Related papers: Runtime Analysis of a Heavy-Tailed $(1+(\lambda,\l…
We propose a new way to self-adjust the mutation rate in population-based evolutionary algorithms in discrete search spaces. Roughly speaking, it consists of creating half the offspring with a mutation rate that is twice the current…
One of the key difficulties in using estimation-of-distribution algorithms is choosing the population size(s) appropriately: Too small values lead to genetic drift, which can cause enormous difficulties. In the regime with no genetic drift,…
While evolutionary algorithms are known to be very successful for a broad range of applications, the algorithm designer is often left with many algorithmic choices, for example, the size of the population, the mutation rates, and the…
We investigate a family of $(\mu+\lambda)$ Genetic Algorithms (GAs) which creates offspring either from mutation or by recombining two randomly chosen parents. By scaling the crossover probability, we can thus interpolate from a fully…
Parameterized runtime analysis seeks to understand the influence of problem structure on algorithmic runtime. In this paper, we contribute to the theoretical understanding of evolutionary algorithms and carry out a parameterized analysis of…
While the theoretical analysis of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) has made significant progress for pseudo-Boolean optimization problems in the last 25 years, only sporadic theoretical results exist on how EAs solve permutation-based…
The paper is devoted to upper bounds on the expected first hitting times of the sets of local or global optima for non-elitist genetic algorithms with very high selection pressure. The results of this paper extend the range of situations…
Most evolutionary algorithms have parameters, which allow a great flexibility in controlling their behavior and adapting them to new problems. To achieve the best performance, it is often needed to control some of the parameters during…
One of the first and easy to use techniques for proving run time bounds for evolutionary algorithms is the so-called method of fitness levels by Wegener. It uses a partition of the search space into a sequence of levels which are traversed…
To gain a better theoretical understanding of how evolutionary algorithms (EAs) cope with plateaus of constant fitness, we propose the $n$-dimensional Plateau$_k$ function as natural benchmark and analyze how different variants of the $(1 +…
The mathematical runtime analysis of evolutionary algorithms traditionally regards the time an algorithm needs to find a solution of a certain quality when initialized with a random population. In practical applications it may be possible…
This paper extends the runtime analysis of non-elitist evolutionary algorithms (EAs) with fitness-proportionate selection from the simple OneMax function to the linear functions. Not only does our analysis cover a larger class of fitness…
We present two adaptive schemes for dynamically choosing the number of parallel instances in parallel evolutionary algorithms. This includes the choice of the offspring population size in a (1+$\lambda$) EA as a special case. Our schemes…
While the theoretical analysis of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) has made significant progress for pseudo-Boolean optimization problems in the last 25 years, only sporadic theoretical results exist on how EAs solve permutation-based…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are general-purpose optimisers that come with several parameters like the sizes of parent and offspring populations or the mutation rate. It is well known that the performance of EAs may depend drastically on…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are population-based general-purpose optimization algorithms, and have been successfully applied in various real-world optimization tasks. However, previous theoretical studies often employ EAs with only a…
The move-acceptance hyper-heuristic was recently shown to be able to leave local optima with astonishing efficiency (Lissovoi et al., Artificial Intelligence (2023)). In this work, we propose two modifications to this algorithm that…
The heavy-tailed mutation operator proposed in Doerr, Le, Makhmara, and Nguyen (GECCO 2017), called \emph{fast mutation} to agree with the previously used language, so far was proven to be advantageous only in mutation-based algorithms.…
Recent works showed that simple success-based rules for self-adjusting parameters in evolutionary algorithms (EAs) can match or outperform the best fixed parameters on discrete problems. Non-elitism in a (1,$\lambda$) EA combined with a…
Many real-world applications have the time-linkage property, and the only theoretical analysis is recently given by Zheng, et al. (TEVC 2021) on their proposed time-linkage OneMax problem, OneMax$_{(0,1^n)}$. However, only two elitist…