ALF: A fitness-based artificial life form for evolving large-scale neural networks

Abstract

Topology and Weight Evolving Artificial Neural Network (TWEANN) is a concept to find the topology and weights of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) using genetic algorithms. However, a well-known downside is that TWEANN algorithms often evolve inefficient large ANNs for large-scale problems and require long runtimes. To address this issue, we propose a new TWEANN algorithm called Artificial Life Form (ALF) with the following technical advancements: (1) speciation via structural and semantic similarity to form better candidate solutions, (2) dynamic adaptation of the observed candidate solutions for better convergence properties, and (3) integration of solution quality into genetic reproduction to increase the probability of optimization success. Experiments on large-scale problems confirm that these approaches allow effective solving of these problems and lead to efficient evolved ANNs.