On the use of feature-maps and parameter control for improved quality-diversity meta-evolution

Historically, most evolutionary algorithms (EAs) were designed to optimise a fitness function, solving a single problem without considerations for generalisation to unseen problems or robustness to perturbations to the evaluation environment. However, it was widely known that successfully converging to the maximum of that fitness function requires maintaining genetic diversity in the population of solutions (see e.g., Laumanns et al. (2002); Gupta and Ghafir (2012); Ursem (2002); Ginley et al. (2011)). Moreover, the use of niching demonstrated how maintaining subpopulations could help find multiple solutions to a single problem (Mahfoud, 1995). Some studies included genetic diversity as one of the objectives of the EA (Toffolo and Benini, 2003). Approaches in evolutionary robotics, artificial life, and neuro-evolution realised that genetic diversity does not necessarily imply a diversity of solutions, since (i) different genotypes may encode the same behaviour and vice versa (especially for complex genotypes such as neural networks); and (ii) many genotypes may encode unsafe or undesirable solutions that should be discarded during evolution (e.g., self-collisions on a multi-joint robot arm). Such approaches began to emphasise behavioural diversity (Mouret and Doncieux, 2009b; Gomez, 2009; Mouret and Doncieux, 2009a; Mouret, 2010), not only as a driver for objective-based evolution but also as the enabler for diversity-or novelty-driven evolution (Lehman and Stanley, 2011a). This work is the extended version of the paper: David M. Bossens & Danesh Tarapore (2021). On the use of feature-maps for improved quality-diversity meta-evolution.