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Evolving autoencoding structures through genetic programming

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Abstract

We propose a novel method to evolve autoencoding structures through genetic programming (GP) for representation learning on high dimensional data. It involves a partitioning scheme of high dimensional input representations for distributed processing as well as an on-line form of learning that allows GP to efficiently process training datasets composed of hundreds or thousands of samples. The use of this on-line learning approach has important consequences in computational cost given different evolutionary population dynamics, namely steady state evolution and generational replacement. We perform a complete experimental study to compare the evolution of autoencoders (AEs) under different population dynamics and genetic operators useful to evolve GP based AEs’ individuals. Also, we compare the performance of GP based AEs with another representation learning method. Competitive results have been achieved through the proposed method. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research work is a precursor within the field of evolutionary deep learning.

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Notes

  1. This holds only if partitions are built by grouping contiguous features, given problems that allow to do so, such as in image, audio, text and time series problems.

  2. Trying to mix portions of encoder and decoder forests to generate an offspring’ decoder or encoder would be an error, because two random crossover points would need to be picked in order to guarantee that resulting forest has a proper number of trees.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by CONACyT under Grant No. 436184 - Becas Nacionales 2016, and Grant No. A1-S-26314 - Integración de Visión y Lenguaje mediante Representaciones Multimodales Aprendidas para Clasificación y Recuperación de Imágenes y Videos.

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Correspondence to Lino Rodriguez-Coayahuitl.

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Rodriguez-Coayahuitl, L., Morales-Reyes, A. & Escalante, H.J. Evolving autoencoding structures through genetic programming. Genet Program Evolvable Mach 20, 413–440 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-019-09354-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-019-09354-4

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