Learning Semantics-aware Search Operators for Genetic Programming

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wyrwiński, Piotr, Krawiec, Krzysztof
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Wyrwiński, Piotr
Krawiec, Krzysztof
author_facet Wyrwiński, Piotr
Krawiec, Krzysztof
contents Fitness landscapes in test-based program synthesis are known to be extremely rugged, with even minimal modifications of programs often leading to fundamental changes in their behavior and, consequently, fitness values. Relying on fitness as the only guidance in iterative search algorithms like genetic programming is thus unnecessarily limiting, especially when combined with purely syntactic search operators that are agnostic about their impact on program behavior. In this study, we propose a semantics-aware search operator that steers the search towards candidate programs that are valuable not only actually (high fitness) but also only potentially, i.e. are likely to be turned into high-quality solutions even if their current fitness is low. The key component of the method is a graph neural network that learns to model the interactions between program instructions and processed data, and produces a saliency map over graph nodes that represents possible search decisions. When applied to a suite of symbolic regression benchmarks, the proposed method outperforms conventional tree-based genetic programming and the ablated variant of the method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04568
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Semantics-aware Search Operators for Genetic Programming
Wyrwiński, Piotr
Krawiec, Krzysztof
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Fitness landscapes in test-based program synthesis are known to be extremely rugged, with even minimal modifications of programs often leading to fundamental changes in their behavior and, consequently, fitness values. Relying on fitness as the only guidance in iterative search algorithms like genetic programming is thus unnecessarily limiting, especially when combined with purely syntactic search operators that are agnostic about their impact on program behavior. In this study, we propose a semantics-aware search operator that steers the search towards candidate programs that are valuable not only actually (high fitness) but also only potentially, i.e. are likely to be turned into high-quality solutions even if their current fitness is low. The key component of the method is a graph neural network that learns to model the interactions between program instructions and processed data, and produces a saliency map over graph nodes that represents possible search decisions. When applied to a suite of symbolic regression benchmarks, the proposed method outperforms conventional tree-based genetic programming and the ablated variant of the method.
title Learning Semantics-aware Search Operators for Genetic Programming
topic Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04568