31,221 research outputs found
A Distributed Pool Architecture for Genetic Algorithms
The genetic algorithm paradigm is a well-known heuristic for solving many problems in science and engineering in which candidate solutions, or “individuals”, are manipulated in ways analogous to biological evolution, to produce new solutions until one with the desired quality is found. As problem sizes increase, a natural question is how to exploit advances in distributed and parallel computing to speed up the execution of genetic algorithms.
This thesis proposes a new distributed architecture for genetic algorithms, based on distributed storage of the individuals in a persistent pool. Processors extract individuals from the pool in order to perform the computations and then insert the resulting individuals back into the pool. Unlike previously proposed approaches, the new approach is tailored for distributed systems in which processors are loosely coupled, failure-prone and can run at different speeds. Proof-of-concept simulation results are presented for four benchmark functions and for a real-world Product Lifecycle Design problem. We have experimented with both the crash failure model and the Byzantine failure model. The results indicate that the approach can deliver improved performance due to the distribution and tolerates a large fraction of processor failures subject to both models
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological
ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital
Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems
to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital
Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating
continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on
evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at
finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital
Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures
originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological
ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from
the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity).
Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating
Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a
metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa
Ecosystem-Oriented Distributed Evolutionary Computing
We create a novel optimisation technique inspired by natural ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
genes which are distributed in a peer-to-peer network, operating continuously
in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary
computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding
solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. We consider from the domain
of computer science distributed evolutionary computing, with the relevant
theory from the domain of theoretical biology, including the fields of
evolutionary and ecological theory, the topological structure of ecosystems,
and evolutionary processes within distributed environments. We then define
ecosystem- oriented distributed evolutionary computing, imbibed with the
properties of self-organisation, scalability and sustainability from natural
ecosystems, including a novel form of distributed evolu- tionary computing.
Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the apparent compromises resulting
from the hybrid model created, such as the network topology.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1112.0204, arXiv:0712.4159, arXiv:0712.4153, arXiv:0712.4102,
arXiv:0910.067
A service oriented architecture for engineering design
Decision making in engineering design can be effectively addressed by using genetic algorithms to solve multi-objective problems. These multi-objective genetic algorithms
(MOGAs) are well suited to implementation in a Service Oriented Architecture. Often the evaluation process of the MOGA is compute-intensive due to the use of a complex computer model to represent the real-world system. The emerging paradigm of Grid Computing offers
a potential solution to the compute-intensive nature of this objective function evaluation, by
allowing access to large amounts of compute resources in a distributed manner. This paper presents a grid-enabled framework for multi-objective optimisation using genetic algorithms (MOGA-G) to aid decision making in engineering design
Neural Architecture Search using Deep Neural Networks and Monte Carlo Tree Search
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has shown great success in automating the
design of neural networks, but the prohibitive amount of computations behind
current NAS methods requires further investigations in improving the sample
efficiency and the network evaluation cost to get better results in a shorter
time. In this paper, we present a novel scalable Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)
based NAS agent, named AlphaX, to tackle these two aspects. AlphaX improves the
search efficiency by adaptively balancing the exploration and exploitation at
the state level, and by a Meta-Deep Neural Network (DNN) to predict network
accuracies for biasing the search toward a promising region. To amortize the
network evaluation cost, AlphaX accelerates MCTS rollouts with a distributed
design and reduces the number of epochs in evaluating a network by transfer
learning, which is guided with the tree structure in MCTS. In 12 GPU days and
1000 samples, AlphaX found an architecture that reaches 97.84\% top-1 accuracy
on CIFAR-10, and 75.5\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, exceeding SOTA NAS methods
in both the accuracy and sampling efficiency. Particularly, we also evaluate
AlphaX on NASBench-101, a large scale NAS dataset; AlphaX is 3x and 2.8x more
sample efficient than Random Search and Regularized Evolution in finding the
global optimum. Finally, we show the searched architecture improves a variety
of vision applications from Neural Style Transfer, to Image Captioning and
Object Detection.Comment: To appear in the Thirty-Fourth AAAI conference on Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI-2020
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