Related papers: Quality with Just Enough Diversity in Evolutionary…
With the development of fast and massively parallel evaluations in many domains, Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, that already proved promising in a large range of applications, have seen their potential multiplied. However, we have yet…
Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of black-box optimization algorithms able to train deep neural networks roughly as well as Q-learning and policy gradient methods on challenging deep reinforcement learning (RL) problems, but are much…
Exploration is a key challenge in Reinforcement Learning, especially in long-horizon, deceptive and sparse-reward environments. For such applications, population-based approaches have proven effective. Methods such as Quality-Diversity…
We explore the use of Evolution Strategies (ES), a class of black box optimization algorithms, as an alternative to popular MDP-based RL techniques such as Q-learning and Policy Gradients. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari show that ES is a…
Evolution Strategies (ES) are a powerful class of blackbox optimization techniques that recently became a competitive alternative to state-of-the-art policy gradient (PG) algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL). We propose a new method…
Quality Diversity (QD) has emerged as a powerful alternative optimization paradigm that aims at generating large and diverse collections of solutions, notably with its flagship algorithm MAP-ELITES (ME) which evolves solutions through…
Evolution Strategy (ES) is a powerful black-box optimization technique based on the idea of natural evolution. In each of its iterations, a key step entails ranking candidate solutions based on some fitness score. For an ES method in…
A fascinating aspect of nature lies in its ability to produce a collection of organisms that are all high-performing in their niche. Quality-Diversity (QD) methods are evolutionary algorithms inspired by this observation, that obtained…
Evolutionary search via the quality-diversity (QD) paradigm can discover highly performing solutions in different behavioural niches, showing considerable potential in complex real-world scenarios such as evolutionary robotics. Yet most QD…
An evolution strategy (ES) variant based on a simplification of a natural evolution strategy recently attracted attention because it performs surprisingly well in challenging deep reinforcement learning domains. It searches for neural…
A fascinating aspect of nature lies in its ability to produce a large and diverse collection of organisms that are all high-performing in their niche. By contrast, most AI algorithms focus on finding a single efficient solution to a given…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, and MAP-Elites (ME) in particular, have proven very useful for a broad range of applications including enabling real robots to recover quickly from joint damage, solving strongly deceptive maze tasks or…
In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning method in a reinforcement learning setting, based on evolution strategies (ES), exploration in parameter space and deterministic policy gradients. ES methods are easy to parallelize, which is…
Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms such as MAP-Elites are a class of optimisation techniques that attempt to find many high performing points that all behave differently according to a user-defined behavioural metric. In this paper we…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms are a new type of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), aiming to find a set of high-performing, yet diverse solutions. They have found many successful applications in reinforcement learning and robotics, helping…
Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a scalable gradient-free alternative to reinforcement learning based LLM fine-tuning, but it remains unclear whether comparable task performance implies comparable solutions in parameter space. We…
Evolution Strategies (ESs) have recently become popular for training deep neural networks, in particular on reinforcement learning tasks, a special form of controller design. Compared to classic problems in continuous direct search, deep…
This paper introduces a user-driven evolutionary algorithm based on Quality Diversity (QD) search. During a design session, the user iteratively selects among presented alternatives and their selections affect the upcoming results. We aim…
In Evolutionary Robotics a population of solutions is evolved to optimize robots that solve a given task. However, in traditional Evolutionary Algorithms, the population of solutions tends to converge to local optima when the problem is…
Since the debut of Evolution Strategies (ES) as a tool for Reinforcement Learning by Salimans et al. 2017, there has been interest in determining the exact relationship between the Evolution Strategies gradient and the gradient of a similar…