Denoising autoencoder genetic programming: strategies to control exploration and exploitation in search

Abstract Denoising autoencoder genetic programming (DAE-GP) is a novel neural network-based estimation of distribution genetic programming approach that uses denoising autoencoder long short-term memory networks as a probabilistic model to replace the standard mutation and recombination operators of genetic programming. At each generation, the idea is to capture promising properties of the parent population in a probabilistic model and to use corruption to transfer variations of these properties to the offspring. This work studies the influence of corruption and sampling steps on search. Corruption partially mutates candidate solutions that are used as input to the model, whereas the number of sampling steps defines how often we re-use the output during model sampling as input to the model. We study the generalization of the royal tree problem, the Airfoil problem, and the Pagie-1 problem, and find that both corruption strength and the number of sampling steps influence exploration and exploitation in search and affect performance: exploration increases with stronger corruption and lower number of sampling steps. The results indicate that both corruption and sampling steps are key to the success of the DAE-GP: it permits us to balance the exploration and exploitation behavior in search, resulting in an improved search quality. However, also selection is important for exploration and exploitation and should be chosen wisely.