Adaptive Quantum-inspired Evolution Strategy

Abstract

Standard Evolution Strategy (ES) produces the next generation via the Gaussian mutation that is not directed toward the optimum. Additionally, self-adaptation mechanism is used in the standard ES to adapt mutation step-size. This paper presents a new evolution strategy which is called Quantum-inspired Evolution Strategy (QES). QES applies a new learning mechanism whereby the information of the mutants is used as a feedback to adapt the mutation direction and step-size simultaneously. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, several experiments on a set of numerical optimization problems are carried out and the results are compared with the standard ES and Covariance Matrix Adaptation ES (CMA-ES) which is the state-of-the-art method for adaptive mutation. The results reveal that QES is superior to standard ES and CMA-ES in terms of convergence speed and accuracy.