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arXiv · 2307.09326

BOP-Elites, a Bayesian Optimisation Approach to Quality Diversity Search with Black-Box descriptor functions

Paul Kent·Adam Gaier·Jean-Baptiste Mouret·Juergen Branke
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Abstract

Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms such as MAP-Elites are a class of optimisation techniques that attempt to find many high performing points that all behave differently according to a user-defined behavioural metric. In this paper we propose the Bayesian Optimisation of Elites (BOP-Elites) algorithm. Designed for problems with expensive black-box fitness and behaviour functions, it is able to return a QD solution-set with excellent final performance already after a relatively small number of samples. BOP-Elites models both fitness and behavioural descriptors with Gaussian Process (GP) surrogate models and uses Bayesian Optimisation (BO) strategies for choosing points to evaluate in order to solve the quality-diversity problem. In addition, BOP-Elites produces high quality surrogate models which can be used after convergence to predict solutions with any behaviour in a continuous range. An empirical comparison shows that BOP-Elites significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms without the need for problem-specific parameter tuning.

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Paul Kent, Adam Gaier, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Juergen Branke. 2023-07-18. BOP-Elites, a Bayesian Optimisation Approach to Quality Diversity Search with Black-Box descriptor functions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09326

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