Related papers: Scaling MAP-Elites to Deep Neuroevolution

We analyze the efficacy of modern neuro-evolutionary strategies for continuous control optimization. Overall, the results collected on a wide variety of qualitatively different benchmark problems indicate that these methods are generally…

Deep learning has significantly advanced image edge detection (ED), primarily through improved feature extraction. However, most existing ED models apply uniform feature fusion across all pixels, ignoring critical differences between…

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have recently been integrated to take the advantage of the both methods for better exploration and exploitation.The evolutionary part in these hybrid methods maintains a…

The performance of deep neural networks, such as Deep Belief Networks formed by Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), strongly depends on their training, which is the process of adjusting their parameters. This process can be posed as an…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from three core difficulties: temporal credit assignment with sparse rewards, lack…

Brain-body co-optimization suffers from fragile co-adaptation where brains become over-specialized for particular bodies, hindering their ability to transfer well to others. Evolutionary algorithms tend to discard such low-performing…

Quality-Diversity (QD) has demonstrated potential in discovering collections of diverse solutions to optimisation problems. Originally designed for deterministic environments, QD has been extended to noisy, stochastic, or uncertain domains…

The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is a popular method to deal with nonconvex and/or stochastic optimization problems when the gradient information is not available. Being based on the CMA-ES, the recently proposed…

Evolution Strategies such as CMA-ES (covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy) and NES (natural evolution strategy) have been widely used in machine learning applications, where an objective function is optimized without using its…

Evolutionary computation (EC)-based neural architecture search (NAS) has achieved remarkable performance in the automatic design of neural architectures. However, the high computational cost associated with evaluating searched architectures…

Real-world optimization often demands diverse, high-quality solutions. Quality-Diversity (QD) optimization is a multifaceted approach in evolutionary algorithms that aims to generate a set of solutions that are both high-performing and…

The encoding of solutions in black-box optimization is a delicate, handcrafted balance between expressiveness and domain knowledge -- between exploring a wide variety of solutions, and ensuring that those solutions are useful. Our main…

Model rocketry presents a design task accessible to undergraduates while remaining an interesting challenge. Allowing for variation in fins, nose cones, and body tubes presents a rich design space containing numerous ways to achieve various…

Soft robotics has emerged as the standard solution for grasping deformable objects, and has proven invaluable for mobile robotic exploration in extreme environments. However, despite this growth, there are no widely adopted computational…

Evolution Strategies (ES) is a class of powerful black-box optimisation methods that are highly parallelisable and can handle non-differentiable and noisy objectives. However, na\"ive ES becomes prohibitively expensive at scale on GPUs due…

In real-world environments, robots need to be resilient to damages and robust to unforeseen scenarios. Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms have been successfully used to make robots adapt to damages in seconds by leveraging a diverse set of…

A new model for evolving Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) is proposed in this paper. The model is based on the Multi Expression Programming (MEP) technique. Each MEP chromosome encodes an evolutionary pattern that is repeatedly used for…

As a cornerstone in the Evolutionary Computation (EC) domain, Differential Evolution (DE) is known for its simplicity and effectiveness in handling challenging black-box optimization problems. While the advantages of DE are well-recognized,…

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms and evolution strategies (ES) have been applied to various tasks, showing excellent performances. These have the opposite properties, with DRL having good sample efficiency and poor stability,…

A prevalent limitation of optimizing over a single objective is that it can be misguided, becoming trapped in local optimum. This can be rectified by Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, where a population of high-quality and diverse…