arXiv Machine Learning By Konstantinos Zacharopoulos, Alexandra Bekou, Jose M Serradell, Foteini Paraskevopoulou, Apostolos Fournaris, Ioannis Arapakis, Oscar Lao

TRON: Transferring Naturally Evolved Network Architectures into Neuroevolution

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

TRON (TRansfer Of Natural networks) is a neuroevolution framework that uses experimentally characterized protein‑protein interaction (PPI) networks as architectural priors instead of random topologies. By combining classical evolutionary operators with neuroevolution techniques such as speciation and species quarantine, TRON improves the preservation of functional organization during mutation and recombination. Evaluations on six benchmark datasets show that TRON achieves the best predictive performance on all classification tasks and most regression tasks, with lower variability across runs, indicating greater robustness and convergence stability at the cost of higher computational effort.

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arXiv AI
Oct 2

Multi-Behavioral Evolved Substrates Through Neuromodulation and Activation Selection

The paper investigates whether artificial evolution can replicate biological neuromodulation and diverse neuron types in indirectly encoded substrates. Experiments show that neuromodulation alone cannot overcome a 75% performance ceiling on parity tasks, but combining neuromodulation with per‑task activation function selection allows a single evolving genotype to achieve 100% success across five tasks. This demonstrates that both neuromodulation and evolvable computational primitives are necessary for multi‑behavioral open‑ended evolution.

By Romain Claret, Michael O'Neill, Paul Cotofrei, Kilian Stoffel
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Per-Node Activation Function Evolution in Indirectly Encoded Substrates: Solvability, Limits, and Emergent Diversity

The paper demonstrates that using a single activation function across all nodes in artificial neural networks imposes hard limits on evolutionary search, particularly for sparse evolved substrates. By evolving per-node activation functions from an 18-function palette, the authors show that oscillatory functions can solve parity problems at all tested scales, while monotonic functions fail beyond the simplest case. The study reveals that the choice of activation functions, beyond topology and weights, critically influences what evolutionary search can achieve, and that heterogeneous assignments discovered via indirect encoding are unlikely to be selected manually.

By Romain Claret, Michael O'Neill, Paul Cotofrei, Kilian Stoffel
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

EvoTreeNAD: Genealogy-Guided Evolution for LLM-Driven Neural Architecture Discovery

EvoTreeNAD is a genealogy‑guided evolutionary algorithm that autonomously discovers neural architectures without a predefined seed or search space. Starting from an empty root, it builds a persistent genealogy where each node represents a complete architecture; top‑percentile values from nodes and descendants steer lineage selection. The method combines an Idea Agent that proposes variants and a Code Agent that implements them, with theoretical analysis showing stationary variation regimes and empirical results demonstrating superior performance on CIFAR‑10/100 and MedMNIST‑v2 tasks.

By Lishan Yu, Derek Jiu, Qizhen Lan, Xiaoqian Jiang