QDax: on the benefits of massive parallelization for quality-diversity
File(s)qdax_gecco_poster.pdf (734.08 KB)
Published version
Author(s)
Lim, Bryan
Allard, Maxime
Grillotti, Luca
Cully, Antoine
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms are a well-known approach to generate large collections of diverse and high-quality policies. However, QD algorithms are also known to be data-inefficient, requiring large amounts of computational resources and are slow when used in practice for robotics tasks. Policy evaluations are already commonly performed in parallel to speed up QD algorithms but have limited capabilities on a single machine as most physics simulators run on CPUs. With recent advances in simulators that run on accelerators, thousands of evaluations can be performed in parallel on single GPU/TPU. In this paper, we present QDax, an implementation of MAP-Elites which leverages massive parallelism on accelerators to make QD algorithms more accessible. We show that QD algorithms are ideal candidates and can scale with massive parallelism to be run at interactive timescales. The increase in parallelism does not significantly affect the performance of QD algorithms, while reducing experiment runtimes by two factors of magnitudes, turning days of computation into minutes. These results show that QD can now benefit from hardware acceleration, which contributed significantly to the bloom of deep learning.
Date Issued
2022-07-19
Date Acceptance
2022-07-01
Citation
GECCO '22: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion, 2022, pp.128-131
ISBN
9781450392686
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Start Page
128
End Page
131
Journal / Book Title
GECCO '22: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2022 Owner/Author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Identifier
https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:001035469400052&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=a2bf6146997ec60c407a63945d4e92bb
Source
Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)
Subjects
Computer Science
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Hardware Acceleration
MAP-Elites
Quality Diversity
Robotics
Science & Technology
Technology
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2022-07-09
Finish Date
2022-07-13
Coverage Spatial
MA, Boston