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Optimization plays an essential role in industrial design, but is not limited to minimization of a simple function, such as cost or strength. These tools are also used in conceptual phases, to better understand what is possible. To support this exploration we focus on Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms, which produce sets of varied, high performing solutions. These techniques often require the evaluation of millions of solutions -- making them impractical in design cases. In this thesis we propose methods to radically improve the data-efficiency of QD with machine learning, enabling its application to design. In our first contribution, we develop a method of modeling the performance of evolved neural networks used for control and design. The structures of these networks grow and change, making them difficult to model -- but with a new method we are able to estimate their performance based on their heredity, improving data-efficiency by several times. In our second contribution we combine model-based optimization with MAP-Elites, a QD algorithm. A model of performance is created from known designs, and MAP-Elites creates a new set of designs using this approximation. A subset of these designs are the evaluated to improve the model, and the process repeats. We show that this approach improves the efficiency of MAP-Elites by orders of magnitude. Our third contribution integrates generative models into MAP-Elites to learn domain specific encodings. A variational autoencoder is trained on the solutions produced by MAP-Elites, capturing the common “recipe” for high performance. This learned encoding can then be reused by other algorithms for rapid optimization, including MAP-Elites. Throughout this thesis, though the focus of our vision is design, we examine applications in other fields, such as robotics. These advances are not exclusive to design, but serve as foundational work on the integration of QD and machine learning.
Design optimization techniques are often used at the beginning of the design process to explore the space of possible designs. In these domains illumination algorithms, such as MAP-Elites, are promising alternatives to classic optimization algorithms because they produce diverse, high-quality solutions in a single run, instead of only a single near-optimal solution. Unfortunately, these algorithms currently require a large number of function evaluations, limiting their applicability. In this article we introduce a new illumination algorithm, Surrogate-Assisted Illumination (SAIL), that leverages surrogate modeling techniques to create a map of the design space according to user-defined features while minimizing the number of fitness evaluations. On a two-dimensional airfoil optimization problem SAIL produces hundreds of diverse but high-performing designs with several orders of magnitude fewer evaluations than MAP-Elites or CMA-ES. We demonstrate that SAIL is also capable of producing maps of high-performing designs in realistic three-dimensional aerodynamic tasks with an accurate flow simulation. Data-efficient design exploration with SAIL can help designers understand what is possible, beyond what is optimal, by considering more than pure objective-based optimization.
Surrogate-assistance approaches have long been used in computationally expensive domains to improve the data-efficiency of optimization algorithms. Neuroevolution, however, has so far resisted the application of these techniques because it requires the surrogate model to make fitness predictions based on variable topologies, instead of a vector of parameters. Our main insight is that we can sidestep this problem by using kernel-based surrogate models, which require only the definition of a distance measure between individuals. Our second insight is that the well-established Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm provides a computationally efficient distance measure between dissimilar networks in the form of "compatibility distance", initially designed to maintain topological diversity. Combining these two ideas, we introduce a surrogate-assisted neuroevolution algorithm that combines NEAT and a surrogate model built using a compatibility distance kernel. We demonstrate the data-efficiency of this new algorithm on the low dimensional cart-pole swing-up problem, as well as the higher dimensional half-cheetah running task. In both tasks the surrogate-assisted variant achieves the same or better results with several times fewer function evaluations as the original NEAT.