171 research outputs found
Artificial evolution with Binary Decision Diagrams: a study in evolvability in neutral spaces
This thesis develops a new approach to evolving Binary Decision Diagrams, and uses it to study evolvability issues. For reasons that are not yet fully understood, current approaches to artificial evolution fail to exhibit the evolvability so readily exhibited in nature. To be able to apply evolvability to artificial evolution the field must first understand and characterise it; this will then lead to systems which are much more capable than they are currently. An experimental approach is taken. Carefully crafted, controlled experiments elucidate the mechanisms and properties that facilitate evolvability, focusing on the roles and interplay between neutrality, modularity, gradualism, robustness and diversity. Evolvability is found to emerge under gradual evolution as a biased distribution of functionality within the genotype-phenotype map, which serves to direct phenotypic variation. Neutrality facilitates fitness-conserving exploration, completely alleviating local optima. Population diversity, in conjunction with neutrality, is shown to facilitate the evolution of evolvability. The search is robust, scalable, and insensitive to the absence of initial diversity. The thesis concludes that gradual evolution in a search space that is free of local optima by way of neutrality can be a viable alternative to problematic evolution on multi-modal landscapes
Redundant Representations in Evolutionary Computation
Redundanz , Evolutionary programmin
Competent Program Evolution, Doctoral Dissertation, December 2006
Heuristic optimization methods are adaptive when they sample problem solutions based on knowledge of the search space gathered from past sampling. Recently, competent evolutionary optimization methods have been developed that adapt via probabilistic modeling of the search space. However, their effectiveness requires the existence of a compact problem decomposition in terms of prespecified solution parameters. How can we use these techniques to effectively and reliably solve program learning problems, given that program spaces will rarely have compact decompositions? One method is to manually build a problem-specific representation that is more tractable than the general space. But can this process be automated? My thesis is that the properties of programs and program spaces can be leveraged as inductive bias to reduce the burden of manual representation-building, leading to competent program evolution. The central contributions of this dissertation are a synthesis of the requirements for competent program evolution, and the design of a procedure, meta-optimizing semantic evolutionary search (MOSES), that meets these requirements. In support of my thesis, experimental results are provided to analyze and verify the effectiveness of MOSES, demonstrating scalability and real-world applicability
Evolving Graphs with Semantic Neutral Drift
We introduce the concept of Semantic Neutral Drift (SND) for genetic
programming (GP), where we exploit equivalence laws to design semantics
preserving mutations guaranteed to preserve individuals' fitness scores. A
number of digital circuit benchmark problems have been implemented with
rule-based graph programs and empirically evaluated, demonstrating quantitative
improvements in evolutionary performance. Analysis reveals that the benefits of
the designed SND reside in more complex processes than simple growth of
individuals, and that there are circumstances where it is beneficial to choose
otherwise detrimental parameters for a GP system if that facilitates the
inclusion of SND
Landscapes and Effective Fitness
The concept of a fitness landscape arose in theoretical biology, while that of effective fitness has its origin in evolutionary computation. Both have emerged as useful conceptual tools with which to understand the dynamics of evolutionary processes, especially in the presence of complex genotype-phenotype relations. In this contribution we attempt to provide a unified discussion of these two approaches, discussing both their advantages and disadvantages in the context of some simple models. We also discuss how fitness and effective fitness change under various transformations of the configuration space of the underlying genetic model, concentrating on coarse-graining transformations and on a particular coordinate transformation that provides an appropriate basis for illuminating the structure and consequences of recombination
Evolving Graphs by Graph Programming
Graphs are a ubiquitous data structure in computer science and can be used to represent solutions to difficult problems in many distinct domains. This motivates the use of Evolutionary Algorithms to search over graphs and efficiently find approximate solutions. However, existing techniques often represent and manipulate graphs in an ad-hoc manner. In contrast, rule-based graph programming offers a formal mechanism for describing relations over graphs.
This thesis proposes the use of rule-based graph programming for representing and implementing genetic operators over graphs. We present the Evolutionary Algorithm Evolving Graphs by Graph Programming and a number of its extensions which are capable of learning stateful and stateless digital circuits, symbolic expressions and Artificial Neural Networks. We demonstrate that rule-based graph programming may be used to implement new and effective constraint-respecting mutation operators and show that these operators may strictly generalise others found in the literature. Through our proposal of Semantic Neutral Drift, we accelerate the search process by building plateaus into the fitness landscape using domain knowledge of equivalence. We also present Horizontal Gene Transfer, a mechanism whereby graphs may be passively recombined without disrupting their fitness.
Through rigorous evaluation and analysis of over 20,000 independent executions of Evolutionary Algorithms, we establish numerous benefits of our approach. We find that on many problems, Evolving Graphs by Graph Programming and its variants may significantly outperform other approaches from the literature. Additionally, our empirical results provide further evidence that neutral drift aids the efficiency of evolutionary search
A multiple expression alignment framework for genetic programming
Vanneschi, L., Scott, K., & Castelli, M. (2018). A multiple expression alignment framework for genetic programming. In M. Castelli, L. Sekanina, M. Zhang, S. Cagnoni, & P. GarcĂa-Sánchez (Eds.), Genetic Programming: 21st European Conference, EuroGP 2018, Proceedings, pp. 166-183. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); Vol. 10781 LNCS). Springer Verlag. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-77553-1_11Alignment in the error space is a recent idea to exploit semantic awareness in genetic programming. In a previous contribution, the concepts of optimally aligned and optimally coplanar individuals were introduced, and it was shown that given optimally aligned, or optimally coplanar, individuals, it is possible to construct a globally optimal solution analytically. As a consequence, genetic programming methods, aimed at searching for optimally aligned, or optimally coplanar, individuals were introduced. In this paper, we critically discuss those methods, analyzing their major limitations and we propose new genetic programming systems aimed at overcoming those limitations. The presented experimental results, conducted on four real-life symbolic regression problems, show that the proposed algorithms outperform not only the existing methods based on the concept of alignment in the error space, but also geometric semantic genetic programming and standard genetic programming.authorsversionpublishe
Models in molecular evolution: the case of toyLIFE
MenciĂłn Internacional en el tĂtulo de doctorThis thesis set out to contribute to the growing body of knowledge pertaining
models of the genotype-phenotype map. In the process, we proposed
and studied a new computational model, toyLIFE, and a new metaphor for
molecular evolution —adaptive multiscapes. We also studied functional
promiscuity and the evolutionary dynamics of shifting environments.
The first result of this thesis was the definition of toyLIFE, a simplified
model of cellular biology that incorporated toy versions of genes, proteins
and regulation as well as metabolic laws. Molecules in toyLIFE interact
between each other following the laws of the HP protein folding model,
which endows toyLIFE with a simplified chemistry. From these laws,
we saw how something reminiscent of cell-like behavior emerged, with
complex regulatory and metabolic networks that grew in complexity as the
genome increased.
toyLIFE is, to our knowledge, the first multi-level model of the genotype-
phenotype map, compared to previous models studied in the literature,
such as RNA, proteins, gene regulatory networks (GRNs) or metabolic
networks. All of these models either disregarded cellular context when assigning
phenotype and function (RNA and proteins) or omitted genome
dynamics, by defining their genotypes from high-level abstractions (GRNs
and metabolic networks). toyLIFE shares the same features exhibited by all
genotype-phenotype maps studied so far. There is strong degeneracy in the
map, with many genotypes mapping into the same phenotype. This degeneracy
translates into the existence of neutral networks, that span genotype
space as soon as the genotype contains more than two genes. There is also
a strong asymmetry in the size distribution of phenotypes: most phenotypes were rare, while a few of them covered most genotypes. Moreover,
most common phenotypes are easily accessed from each other.
We also studied the prevalence of functional promiscuity (the ability to
perform more than one function) in computational models of the genotypephenotype
map. In particular, we studied RNA, Boolean GRNs and toy-
LIFE. Our results suggest that promiscuity is the norm, rather than the exception.
These results prompt us to rethink our understanding of biology
as a neatly functioning machine. One of the most interesting results of
this thesis came from studying the evolutionary dynamics of shifting environments
in populations showing functional promiscuity: our results show
that there is an optimal frequency of change that minimizes the time to
extinction of the population.
Finally, we presented a new metaphor for molecular evolution: adaptive
multiscapes. This framework intends to update the fitness landscape
metaphor proposed by Sewall Wright in the 1930s. Adaptive multiscapes
include many features that we have learned from computational studies of
the genotype-phenotype map, and that have been discussed throughout the
thesis. The existence of neutral networks, the asymmetry in phenotype
sizes -and the concomitant asymmetry in phenotype accessibility- and the
presence of functional promiscuity all alter the original fitness landscape
picture.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en IngenierĂa MatemáticaPresidente: Joshua Levy Payne.- Secretario: SaĂşl ArĂ©s GarcĂa.- Vocal: Jacobo Aguirre Arauj
Genetic Improvement of Software (Dagstuhl Seminar 18052)
We document the program and the immediate outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 18052 “Genetic
Improvement of Software”. The seminar brought together researchers in Genetic Improvement
(GI) and related areas of software engineering to investigate what is achievable with current technology and the current impediments to progress and how GI can affect the software development
process. Several talks covered the state-of-the-art and work in progress. Seven emergent topics
have been identified ranging from the nature of the GI search space through benchmarking and
practical applications. The seminar has already resulted in multiple research paper publications.
Four by participants of the seminar will be presented at the GI workshop co-located with the
top conference in software engineering - ICSE. Several researchers started new collaborations,
results of which we hope to see in the near future
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