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Nested evolution of an autonomous agent using descriptive encoding

Published: 12 July 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the use of nested evolution in which each step of one evolutionary process involves running a second evolutionary process. We apply this approach to build a neuroevolution system for reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Genetic programming based on a descriptive encoding is used to evolve the neural architecture, while a nested evolution strategy is used to evolve the needed connection weights. We test this hierarchical evolution on a non-Markovian RL problem involving an autonomous foraging agent, finding that the evolved networks significantly outperform a rule-based agent serving as a control.

References

[1]
H. G. Beyer. The Theory of Evolution Strategies. Springer, Berlin, 2001.
[2]
J. Y. Jung and J. A. Reggia. Evolutionary design of neural network architectures using a descriptive encoding language. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 10(6):676--688, Dec. 2006.
[3]
J. A. Reggia, R. Schulz, G. Wilkinson, and J. Uriagereka. Conditions enabling the evolution of inter-agent signaling in an artificial world. Artificial Life, 7(1):3--32, 2001.

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  • (2009)Evolving an autonomous agent for non-Markovian reinforcement learningProceedings of the 11th Annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation10.1145/1569901.1570034(971-978)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2009

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  1. Nested evolution of an autonomous agent using descriptive encoding

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    GECCO '08: Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
    July 2008
    1814 pages
    ISBN:9781605581309
    DOI:10.1145/1389095
    • Conference Chair:
    • Conor Ryan,
    • Editor:
    • Maarten Keijzer
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 12 July 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. descriptive encoding
    2. neuroevolution
    3. reinforcement learning

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    • (2009)Evolving an autonomous agent for non-Markovian reinforcement learningProceedings of the 11th Annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation10.1145/1569901.1570034(971-978)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2009

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