74,151 research outputs found
Towards a Unified Approach to Learning and Adaptation
The aim of this thesis is to develop a system that enables autonomous and situated agents to learn and adapt to the environment in which they live and operate. In doing so, the system exploits both adaptation through learning and evolution. A unified approach to learning and adaptation, which combines the principles of neural networks, reinforcement learning and evolutionary methods, is used as a basis for the development of the system. In this regard, a novel method, called Evolutionary Acquisition of Neural Topologies (EANT), of evolving the structures and weights of neural networks is developed. The method introduces an efficient and compact genetic encoding of a neural network onto a linear genome that encodes the topology of the neural network implicitly in the ordering of the elements of the linear genome. Moreover, it enables one to evaluate the neural network without decoding it. The presented genetic encoding is complete in that it can represent any type of neural network. In addition to this, it is closed under both structural mutation and a specially designed crossover operator which exploits the fact that structures originating from some initial structure have some common parts. For evolving the structure and weights of neural networks, the method uses a biologically inspired meta-level evolutionary process where new structures are explored at larger timescale and existing structures are exploited at smaller timescale. The evolutionary process starts with networks of minimal structures whose initial complexity is specified by the domain expert. The introduction of neural structures by structural mutation results in a gradual increase in the complexity of the neural networks along the evolution. The evolutionary process stops searching for the solution when a solution with the necessary minimum complexity is found. This enables EANT to find optimal neural structures for solving a given learning task. The efficiency of EANT is tested on couple of learning tasks and its performance is found to be very good in comparison to other systems tested on the same tasks
Interpretable Structure-Evolving LSTM
This paper develops a general framework for learning interpretable data
representation via Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks over
hierarchal graph structures. Instead of learning LSTM models over the pre-fixed
structures, we propose to further learn the intermediate interpretable
multi-level graph structures in a progressive and stochastic way from data
during the LSTM network optimization. We thus call this model the
structure-evolving LSTM. In particular, starting with an initial element-level
graph representation where each node is a small data element, the
structure-evolving LSTM gradually evolves the multi-level graph representations
by stochastically merging the graph nodes with high compatibilities along the
stacked LSTM layers. In each LSTM layer, we estimate the compatibility of two
connected nodes from their corresponding LSTM gate outputs, which is used to
generate a merging probability. The candidate graph structures are accordingly
generated where the nodes are grouped into cliques with their merging
probabilities. We then produce the new graph structure with a
Metropolis-Hasting algorithm, which alleviates the risk of getting stuck in
local optimums by stochastic sampling with an acceptance probability. Once a
graph structure is accepted, a higher-level graph is then constructed by taking
the partitioned cliques as its nodes. During the evolving process,
representation becomes more abstracted in higher-levels where redundant
information is filtered out, allowing more efficient propagation of long-range
data dependencies. We evaluate the effectiveness of structure-evolving LSTM in
the application of semantic object parsing and demonstrate its advantage over
state-of-the-art LSTM models on standard benchmarks.Comment: To appear in CVPR 2017 as a spotlight pape
Evolution of Neural Networks for Helicopter Control: Why Modularity Matters
The problem of the automatic development of controllers for vehicles for which the exact characteristics are not known is considered in the context of miniature helicopter flocking. A methodology is proposed in which neural network based controllers are evolved in a simulation using a dynamic model qualitatively similar to the physical helicopter. Several network architectures and evolutionary sequences are investigated, and two approaches are found that can evolve very competitive controllers. The division of the neural network into modules and of the task into incremental steps seems to be a precondition for success, and we analyse why this might be so
Evolving stochastic learning algorithm based on Tsallis entropic index
In this paper, inspired from our previous algorithm, which was based on the theory of Tsallis statistical mechanics, we develop a new evolving stochastic learning algorithm for neural networks. The new algorithm combines deterministic and stochastic search steps by employing a different adaptive stepsize for each network weight, and applies a form of noise that is characterized by the nonextensive entropic index q, regulated by a weight decay term. The behavior of the learning algorithm can be made more stochastic or deterministic depending on the trade off between the temperature T and the q values. This is achieved by introducing a formula that defines a time-dependent relationship between these two important learning parameters. Our experimental study verifies that there are indeed improvements in the convergence speed of this new evolving stochastic learning algorithm, which makes learning faster than using the original Hybrid Learning Scheme (HLS). In addition, experiments are conducted to explore the influence of the entropic index q and temperature T on the convergence speed and stability of the proposed method
Optimization of Evolutionary Neural Networks Using Hybrid Learning Algorithms
Evolutionary artificial neural networks (EANNs) refer to a special class of
artificial neural networks (ANNs) in which evolution is another fundamental
form of adaptation in addition to learning. Evolutionary algorithms are used to
adapt the connection weights, network architecture and learning algorithms
according to the problem environment. Even though evolutionary algorithms are
well known as efficient global search algorithms, very often they miss the best
local solutions in the complex solution space. In this paper, we propose a
hybrid meta-heuristic learning approach combining evolutionary learning and
local search methods (using 1st and 2nd order error information) to improve the
learning and faster convergence obtained using a direct evolutionary approach.
The proposed technique is tested on three different chaotic time series and the
test results are compared with some popular neuro-fuzzy systems and a recently
developed cutting angle method of global optimization. Empirical results reveal
that the proposed technique is efficient in spite of the computational
complexity
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