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A key challenge to make effective use of evolutionary algorithms is to choose appropriate settings for their parameters. However, the appropriate parameter setting generally depends on the structure of the optimisation problem, which is…
Repair operators are often used for constraint handling in constrained combinatorial optimization. We investigate the (1+1)~EA equipped with a tailored jump-and-repair operation that can be used to probabilistically repair infeasible…
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are widely used for their strong asymptotic performance and training stability, but they struggle to scale with larger batch sizes, as additional parallel environments yield redundant data…
Submodular function minimization is a key problem in a wide variety of applications in machine learning, economics, game theory, computer vision, and many others. The general solver has a complexity of $O(n^3 \log^2 n . E +n^4 {\log}^{O(1)}…
The performance of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) varies across problems, making it hard to develop new algorithms or apply existing ones to new problems. To simplify the development and application of new multiobjective…
In Bayesian inference, the most probable explanation (MPE) problem requests a variable instantiation with the highest probability given some evidence. Since a Bayesian network can be encoded as a literal-weighted CNF formula $\varphi$, we…
We study the multi-objective minimum weight base problem, an abstraction of classical NP-hard combinatorial problems such as the multi-objective minimum spanning tree problem. We prove some important properties of the convex hull of the…
Co-evolutionary algorithms (CoEAs), which pair candidate designs with test cases, are frequently used in adversarial optimisation, particularly for binary test-based problems where designs and tests yield binary outcomes. The effectiveness…
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.…
Evolution strategies (ESs) are zeroth-order stochastic black-box optimization heuristics invariant to monotonic transformations of the objective function. They evolve a multivariate normal distribution, from which candidate solutions are…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs), simulating the evolution process of natural species, are used to solve optimization problems. Crossover (also called recombination), originated from simulating the chromosome exchange phenomena in zoogamy…
Adaptive sequential decision making is one of the central challenges in machine learning and artificial intelligence. In such problems, the goal is to design an interactive policy that plans for an action to take, from a finite set of $n$…
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…
The major difficulty in Multi-objective Optimization Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) is how to find an appropriate solution that is able to converge towards the true Pareto Front with high diversity. Most existing methodologies, which have…
We study the problem of maximizing a stochastic monotone submodular function with respect to a matroid constraint. Due to the presence of diminishing marginal values in real-world problems, our model can capture the effect of stochasticity…
A decent number of lower bounds for non-elitist population-based evolutionary algorithms has been shown by now. Most of them are technically demanding due to the (hard to avoid) use of negative drift theorems -- general results which…
The theory of evolutionary computation for discrete search spaces has made significant progress in the last ten years. This survey summarizes some of the most important recent results in this research area. It discusses fine-grained models…
We show that every algorithm for testing $n$-variate Boolean functions for monotonicity must have query complexity $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{1/4})$. All previous lower bounds for this problem were designed for non-adaptive algorithms and, as a…
In solving multi-modal, multi-objective optimization problems (MMOPs), the objective is not only to find a good representation of the Pareto-optimal front (PF) in the objective space but also to find all equivalent Pareto-optimal subsets…
A boundary evolution Algorithm (BEA) is proposed by simultaneously taking into account the bottom and the high-level crossover and mutation, ie., the boundary of the hierarchical genetic algorithm. Operators and optimal individuals based on…