Abstract
To survive in its environment, an animat must have a behavior that is not too disturbed by noise or any other distractor. Its behavior is supposed to be relatively unchanged when tested on similar situations. Evolving controllers that are robust and generalize well over similar contexts remains a challenge for several reasons. One of them comes from the evaluation: how to check a controller for such properties? The fitness may evaluate a distance towards a behavior known to be robust, but such an example is not always available. An alternative is to test the behavior in multiple conditions, actually as many as possible, to avoid overfitting, but this significantly slows down the search process. This issue is expected to become even more critical when evolving behaviors of increasing complexity. To tackle this issue, we propose to formulate it as a problem of behavioral consistency in different contexts. We then propose a fitness objective aimed at explicitly rewarding behavioral consistency. Its principle is to define different sets of contexts and compare the evolved system behavior on each of them. The fitness function thus defined aims at rewarding individuals that exhibit the expected consistency. We apply it to the evolution of two simple computational neuroscience models.
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Ollion, C., Doncieux, S. (2012). Towards Behavioral Consistency in Neuroevolution. In: Ziemke, T., Balkenius, C., Hallam, J. (eds) From Animals to Animats 12. SAB 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7426. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33093-3_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33093-3_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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