Related papers: Optimal Mutation Rates for the $(1+\lambda)$ EA on…
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…
Online algorithm selection (OAS) aims to adapt the optimization process to changes in the fitness landscape and is expected to outperform any single algorithm from a given portfolio. Although this expectation is supported by numerous…
The main goal of diversity optimization is to find a diverse set of solutions which satisfy some lower bound on their fitness. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are often used for such tasks, since they are naturally designed to optimize…
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…
A key property underlying the success of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) is their global search behavior, which allows the algorithms to `jump' from a current state to other parts of the search space, thereby avoiding to get stuck in local…
In a seminal paper in 2013, Witt showed that the (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm with standard bit mutation needs time $(1+o(1))n \ln n/p_1$ to find the optimum of any linear function, as long as the probability $p_1$ to flip exactly one bit…
We present a new method for proving lower bounds on the expected running time of evolutionary algorithms. It is based on fitness-level partitions and an additional condition on transition probabilities between fitness levels. The method is…
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…
It is generally accepted that populations are useful for the global exploration of multi-modal optimisation problems. Indeed, several theoretical results are available showing such advantages over single-trajectory search heuristics. In…
The analysis of randomized search heuristics on classes of functions is fundamental for the understanding of the underlying stochastic process and the development of suitable proof techniques. Recently, remarkable progress has been made in…
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 +…
For every real number $c \geq 1$ and for all $\varepsilon > 0$, there is a fitness function $f : \{0,1\}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ for which the optimal mutation rate for the $(1+1)$ evolutionary algorithm on $f$, denoted $p_n$, satisfies $p_n…
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.…
We argue that proven exponential upper bounds on runtimes, an established area in classic algorithms, are interesting also in heuristic search and we prove several such results. We show that any of the algorithms randomized local search,…
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…
It is an ongoing debate whether and how comma selection in evolutionary algorithms helps to escape local optima. We propose a new benchmark function to investigate the benefits of comma selection: OneMax with randomly planted local optima,…
This paper explores the enhancement of solution diversity in evolutionary algorithms (EAs) for the maximum matching problem, concentrating on complete bipartite graphs and paths. We adopt binary string encoding for matchings and use Hamming…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) form a popular optimisation paradigm inspired by natural evolution. In recent years the field of evolutionary computation has developed a rigorous analytical theory to analyse their runtime on many illustrative…
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…
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…