Fast and stable MAP-Elites in noisy domains using deep grids
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Published version
Author(s)
Flageat, Manon
Cully, Antoine
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Quality-Diversity optimisation algorithms enable the evolutionof collections of both high-performing and diverse solutions.These collections offer the possibility to quickly adapt andswitch from one solution to another in case it is not workingas expected. It therefore finds many applications in real-worlddomain problems such as robotic control. However, QD algo-rithms, like most optimisation algorithms, are very sensitive touncertainty on the fitness function, but also on the behaviouraldescriptors. Yet, such uncertainties are frequent in real-worldapplications. Few works have explored this issue in the spe-cific case of QD algorithms, and inspired by the literature inEvolutionary Computation, mainly focus on using samplingto approximate the ”true” value of the performances of a solu-tion. However, sampling approaches require a high number ofevaluations, which in many applications such as robotics, canquickly become impractical.In this work, we propose Deep-Grid MAP-Elites, a variantof the MAP-Elites algorithm that uses an archive of similarpreviously encountered solutions to approximate the perfor-mance of a solution. We compare our approach to previouslyexplored ones on three noisy tasks: a standard optimisationtask, the control of a redundant arm and a simulated Hexapodrobot. The experimental results show that this simple approachis significantly more resilient to noise on the behavioural de-scriptors, while achieving competitive performances in termsof fitness optimisation, and being more sample-efficient thanother existing approaches.
Date Issued
2020-07-14
Date Acceptance
2020-06-01
Citation
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Artificial Life, 2020, (32), pp.273-282
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Start Page
273
End Page
282
Journal / Book Title
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Artificial Life
Issue
32
Copyright Statement
© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
Source
2020 Conference on Artificial Life
Subjects
cs.NE
cs.NE
cs.LG
cs.RO
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2020-07-13
Finish Date
2020-07-18
Coverage Spatial
Montreal
Date Publish Online
2020-07-14