Learning descriptors for novelty-search based instance generation via meta-evolution

The ability to generate example instances from a domain is important in order to benchmark algorithms and to generate data that covers an instance-space in order to train machine-learning models for algorithm selection. Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms have recently been shown to be effective in ge...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Segredo González, Eduardo Manuel, Marrero Díaz, Alejandro, León Hernández, Coromoto, Hart, Emma
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universidad de La Laguna (ULL)
Repositorio:RIULL. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de La Laguna
OAI Identifier:oai:riull.ull.es:915/40009
Acceso en línea:http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/40009
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Instance generation
Instance-space analysis
Knapsack problem
Novelty search
Evolutionary computation
Neural-network
Descripción
Sumario:The ability to generate example instances from a domain is important in order to benchmark algorithms and to generate data that covers an instance-space in order to train machine-learning models for algorithm selection. Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms have recently been shown to be effective in generating diverse and discriminatory instances with respect to a portfolio of solvers in various combinatorial optimisation domains. However these methods all rely on defining a descriptor which defines the space in which the algorithm searches for diversity: this is usually done manually defining a vector of features relevant to the domain. As this is a limiting factor in the use of QD methods, we propose a meta-QD algorithm which uses an evolutionary algorithm to search for a nonlinear 2D projection of an original feature-space such that applying novelty-search method in this space to generate instances improves the coverage of the instance-space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by generating instances from the Knapsack domain, showing the meta-QD approach both generates instances in regions of an instance-space not covered by other methods, and also produces significantly more instances