NEvoPy Overview¶
Neuroevolution basics¶
Neuroevolution refers to the artificial evolution of neural networks using evolutionary algorithms. It’s heavily inspired by the biological concept of Evolution and makes use of a population-based metaheuristic and mechanisms such as selection, reproduction, recombination and mutation to generate solutions.
A neural network is encoded, either directly or indirectly, by a genome (also called genotype or individual). The neural network encoded by a genome is its phenotype. We call a set of competing genomes a population. A genome’s fitness is a measure of how well the genome performs in a given task. The goal of a neuroevolutionary algorithm is to evolve a population of genomes in order to produce genomes with a high fitness value.
The evolutionary process is divided into generations. In each generation, the population’s genomes have their fitness calculated. Genomes with a higher fitness value have a greater chance of leaving offspring for the next generation. By favoring the reproduction of fitter genomes, the algorithm gradually increases the total fitness of the population.
If you are a beginner to neuroevolution and want to know more about this awesome area of research, here’s a couple of papers and articles to get you started:
Evolving artificial neural networks (great review paper);
Evolving Neural Networks through Augmenting Topologies (the original paper of the NEAT algorithm);
Neuroevolution: A different kind of deep learning (great introductory article about NE, by the creator of NEAT);
Neuroevolution: A Primer On Evolving Artificial Neural Networks (great introductory article about NE);
Welcoming the Era of Deep Neuroevolution (article about recent research by Uber AI Labs).
Populations and genomes in NEvoPy¶
In NEvoPy, a genome is an instance of a subclass that implements
BaseGenome
. Although each neuroevolutionary algorithm defines its own
type of genome by implementing the BaseGenome
class, all genomes are
governed by the same general API. Note that in NEvoPy’s API there isn’t any
distinction between a genome and the neural network it encodes. A genome, just
like a neural network, must be capable of processing inputs based on its nodes
and connections in order to produce an output. It also must be able to mutate
and to generate offspring.
A population of genomes, on the other hand, is represented by the class
BasePopulation
. It defines a general API that all neuroevolutionary
algorithms implemented by NEvoPy follow. Each algorithm makes its own
implementation of that class - it’s where the core of the evolutionary algorithm
lives. The main method of the API is BasePopulation.evolve()
, which
triggers the evolutionary process in a population.
Most neuroevolutionary algorithms use a genetic algorithm to evolve the neural
networks. What usually changes between different algorithms is how the genomes
behave (how they reproduce, mutate and encode a neural network, for example).
With that in mind, NEvoPy implements a general-purpose genetic
algorithm (see GeneticPopulation
) that can be used as a base for most
neuroevolutionary algorithms. This algorithm doesn’t make strong assumptions
about the genomes its evolving (it “doesn’t care” if the genome encodes a
network directly or indirectly, for example), so it can be used in a wide
variety of scenarios. It also supports speciation.
NEvoPy currently implements the following neuroevolutionary algorithms:
However, if you need more, implementing your own neuroevolutionary algorithm
with NEvoPy is easy. Simply create a class that implements
BaseGenome
(thus defining how you want your genomes to behave) and let
GeneticPopulation
do the rest.
Evolving neural networks with NEvoPy¶
To evolve some neural networks with NEvoPy, the first thing you have to do is
create a new population of genomes (represented by a class that implements
BasePopulation
). As an example, let’s create a
NeatPopulation
(implements the NEAT algorithm):
import nevopy as ne population = ne.neat.NeatPopulation(size=100, num_inputs=10, num_outputs=3)
The code above creates an instance of NeatPopulation
, used to evolve
instances of NeatGenome
with the NEAT algorithm. The genomes are built
to receive an array-like input of length 10 and to output the results as an
array-like object of length 3. In NEvoPy, the inputs and outputs are, in most
cases, instances of numpy.ndarray
or tensorflow.tensor
.
Now, we need to specify some routine for evaluating the population’s genomes, i.e., for measuring the performance of each of the population’s genomes on the task at hand in each generation. We call the measure of a genome’s performance its fitness and the routine used to calculate this value a fitness function. Generally, a fitness function should look like this:
def fitness_function(genome): # (the genome's fitness is calculated here) # ... return fitness
Having created a population and defined a fitness function, we’re ready to start
the evolutionary process. We do that by calling the
evolve()
method:
history = population.evolve(generations=100, fitness_function=fitness_function)
The code above runs the NEAT algorithm for 100 generations. The
evolve()
method returns a History
object, which contains useful statistics related to the evolutionary process. We
can, for example, visualize the progression of the population’s fitness by
executing the following:
history.visualize()
Here is an example of a plot generated by this method:
The code bellow gets the fittest genome of the population, visualizes its topology and saves the genome:
best_genome = population.fittest() best_genome.visualize() best_genome.save("./best_genome.pkl")
For more information on how NEvoPy works, please take a look at our docs. For more practical examples, go to here.