Related papers: Stagnation Detection with Randomized Local Search
Recent theoretical research has shown that self-adjusting and self-adaptive mechanisms can provably outperform static settings in evolutionary algorithms for binary search spaces. However, the vast majority of these studies focuses on…
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 +…
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…
Stagnation detection has been proposed as a mechanism for randomized search heuristics to escape from local optima by automatically increasing the size of the neighborhood to find the so-called gap size, i.e., the distance to the next…
We propose a new, flexible approach for dynamically maintaining successful mutation rates in evolutionary algorithms using $k$-bit flip mutations. The algorithm adds successful mutation rates to an archive of promising rates that are…
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…
Two mechanisms have recently been proposed that can significantly speed up finding distant improving solutions via mutation, namely using a random mutation rate drawn from a heavy-tailed distribution ("fast mutation", Doerr et al. (2017))…
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…
It is known that the evolutionary algorithm $(1+1)$-EA with mutation rate $c/n$ optimises every monotone function efficiently if $c<1$, and needs exponential time on some monotone functions (HotTopic functions) if $c\geq 2.2$. We study the…
The OneMax problem, alternatively known as the Hamming distance problem, is often referred to as the "drosophila of evolutionary computation (EC)", because of its high relevance in theoretical and empirical analyses of EC approaches. It is…
While most theoretical run time analyses of discrete randomized search heuristics provide bounds on the expected number of evaluations to find the global optimum, we consider the anytime performance of evolutionary and…
In the last decade remarkable progress has been made in development of suitable proof techniques for analysing randomised search heuristics. The theoretical investigation of these algorithms on classes of functions is essential to the…
Jump functions are the {most-studied} non-unimodal benchmark in the theory of randomized search heuristics, in particular, evolutionary algorithms (EAs). They have significantly improved our understanding of how EAs escape from local…
A core feature of evolutionary algorithms is their mutation operator. Recently, much attention has been devoted to the study of mutation operators with dynamic and non-uniform mutation rates. Following up on this line of work, we propose a…
Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) are one branch of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) in the broad sense that they evolve a probabilistic model instead of a population. Many existing algorithms fall into this category. Analogous to…
Current algorithms used to put a lattice gauge configuration into Landau gauge either suffer from the problem of critical slowing-down or involve an additional computational expense to overcome it. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), which have…
We analyse the performance of well-known evolutionary algorithms (1+1)EA and (1+$\lambda$)EA in the prior noise model, where in each fitness evaluation the search point is altered before evaluation with probability $p$. We present refined…
We study unbiased $(1+1)$ evolutionary algorithms on linear functions with an unknown number $n$ of bits with non-zero weight. Static algorithms achieve an optimal runtime of $O(n (\ln n)^{2+\epsilon})$, however, it remained unclear whether…
Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and other randomized search heuristics are often considered as unbiased algorithms that are invariant with respect to different transformations of the underlying search space. However, if a certain amount of…
In many real-world optimization problems, the objective function evaluation is subject to noise, and we cannot obtain the exact objective value. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs), a type of general-purpose randomized optimization algorithm,…