Related papers: Benchmarking a $(\mu+\lambda)$ Genetic Algorithm w…
Understanding how crossover works is still one of the big challenges in evolutionary computation research, and making our understanding precise and proven by mathematical means might be an even bigger one. As one of few examples where…
It is known that the $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$~Genetic Algorithm (GA) with self-adjusting parameter choices achieves a linear expected optimization time on OneMax if its hyper-parameters are suitably chosen. However, it is not very well…
The $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm is a bright example of an evolutionary algorithm which was developed based on the insights from theoretical findings. This algorithm uses crossover, and it was shown to asymptotically outperform…
Explaining to what extent the real power of genetic algorithms lies in the ability of crossover to recombine individuals into higher quality solutions is an important problem in evolutionary computation. In this paper we show how the…
Parent selection methods are widely used in evolutionary computation to accelerate the optimization process, yet their theoretical benefits are still poorly understood. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing a parent selection…
Population diversity is essential for avoiding premature convergence in Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and for the effective use of crossover. Yet the dynamics of how diversity emerges in populations are not well understood. We use rigorous…
The $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm, first proposed at GECCO 2013, showed a surprisingly good performance on so me optimization problems. The theoretical analysis so far was restricted to the OneMax test function, where this GA…
Most evolutionary algorithms (EAs) used in practice employ crossover. In contrast, only for few and mostly artificial examples a runtime advantage from crossover could be proven with mathematical means. The most convincing such result shows…
The $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm is one of the few algorithms for which a super-constant speed-up through the use of crossover could be proven. So far, this algorithm has been used with parameters based also on intuitive…
We re-investigate a fundamental question: how effective is crossover in Genetic Algorithms in combining building blocks of good solutions? Although this has been discussed controversially for decades, we are still lacking a rigorous and…
Genetic programming is a powerful heuristic search technique that is used for a number of real world applications to solve among others regression, classification, and time-series forecasting problems. A lot of progress towards a theoretic…
Evolutionary algorithms are known to be robust to noise in the evaluation of the fitness. In particular, larger offspring population sizes often lead to strong robustness. We analyze to what extent the $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic…
The use of balanced crossover operators in Genetic Algorithms (GA) ensures that the binary strings generated as offsprings have the same Hamming weight of the parents, a constraint which is sought in certain discrete optimization problems.…
The compact genetic algorithm (cGA) is one of the simplest estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs). Next to the univariate marginal distribution algorithm (UMDA) -- another simple EDA -- , the cGA has been subject to extensive…
This paper analyzes the relative advantages between crossover and mutation on a class of deterministic and stochastic additively separable problems. This study assumes that the recombination and mutation operators have the knowledge of the…
We propose a genetic algorithm (GA) for hyperparameter optimization of artificial neural networks which includes chromosomal crossover as well as a decoupling of parameters (i.e., weights and biases) from hyperparameters (e.g., learning…
The JUMP$_k$ benchmark was the first problem for which crossover was proven to give a speed-up over mutation-only evolutionary algorithms. Jansen and Wegener (2002) proved an upper bound of $O(\text{poly}(n) + 4^k/p_c)$ for the ($\mu$+1)…
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.…
Evolutionary algorithms rely very heavily on randomized behavior. Execution speed, therefore, depends strongly on how we implement randomness, such as our choice of pseudorandom number generator, or the algorithms used to map pseudorandom…
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…