Illuminating the Diversity-Fitness Trade-Off in Black-Box Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Santoni, Maria Laura, Raponi, Elena, Neumann, Aneta, Neumann, Frank, Preuss, Mike, Doerr, Carola
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Santoni, Maria Laura
Raponi, Elena
Neumann, Aneta
Neumann, Frank
Preuss, Mike
Doerr, Carola
author_facet Santoni, Maria Laura
Raponi, Elena
Neumann, Aneta
Neumann, Frank
Preuss, Mike
Doerr, Carola
contents In real-world applications, users often favor structurally diverse design choices over one high-quality solution. It is hence important to consider more solutions that decision makers can compare and further explore based on additional criteria. Alongside the existing approaches of evolutionary diversity optimization, quality diversity, and multimodal optimization, this paper presents a fresh perspective on this challenge by considering the problem of identifying a fixed number of solutions with a pairwise distance above a specified threshold while maximizing their average quality. We obtain first insight into these objectives by performing a subset selection on the search trajectories of different well-established search heuristics, whether they have been specifically designed with diversity in mind or not. We emphasize that the main goal of our work is not to present a new algorithm but to understand the capability of off-the-shelf algorithms to quantify the trade-off between the minimum pairwise distance within batches of solutions and their average quality. We also analyze how this trade-off depends on the properties of the underlying optimization problem. A possibly surprising outcome of our empirical study is the observation that naive uniform random sampling establishes a very strong baseline for our problem, hardly ever outperformed by the search trajectories of the considered heuristics. We interpret these results as a motivation to develop algorithms tailored to produce diverse solutions of high average quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_16393
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Illuminating the Diversity-Fitness Trade-Off in Black-Box Optimization
Santoni, Maria Laura
Raponi, Elena
Neumann, Aneta
Neumann, Frank
Preuss, Mike
Doerr, Carola
Machine Learning
In real-world applications, users often favor structurally diverse design choices over one high-quality solution. It is hence important to consider more solutions that decision makers can compare and further explore based on additional criteria. Alongside the existing approaches of evolutionary diversity optimization, quality diversity, and multimodal optimization, this paper presents a fresh perspective on this challenge by considering the problem of identifying a fixed number of solutions with a pairwise distance above a specified threshold while maximizing their average quality. We obtain first insight into these objectives by performing a subset selection on the search trajectories of different well-established search heuristics, whether they have been specifically designed with diversity in mind or not. We emphasize that the main goal of our work is not to present a new algorithm but to understand the capability of off-the-shelf algorithms to quantify the trade-off between the minimum pairwise distance within batches of solutions and their average quality. We also analyze how this trade-off depends on the properties of the underlying optimization problem. A possibly surprising outcome of our empirical study is the observation that naive uniform random sampling establishes a very strong baseline for our problem, hardly ever outperformed by the search trajectories of the considered heuristics. We interpret these results as a motivation to develop algorithms tailored to produce diverse solutions of high average quality.
title Illuminating the Diversity-Fitness Trade-Off in Black-Box Optimization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16393