A variety of methods have been applied to the architectural configuration and learning or training of artificial deep neural networks (DNN). These methods play a crucial role in the success or failure of the DNN for most problems and applications. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are gaining momentum as a computationally feasible method for the automated optimisation and training of DNNs. Neuroevolution is a term which describes these processes of automated configuration and training of DNNs using EAs. While many works exist in the literature, no comprehensive surveys currently exist focusing exclusively on the strengths and limitations of using neuroevolution approaches in DNNs. Prolonged absence of such surveys can lead to a disjointed and fragmented field preventing DNNs researchers potentially adopting neuroevolutionary methods in their own research, resulting in lost opportunities for improving performance and wider application within real-world deep learning problems. This paper presents a comprehensive survey, discussion and evaluation of the state-of-the-art works on using EAs for architectural configuration and training of DNNs. Based on this survey, the paper highlights the most pertinent current issues and challenges in neuroevolution and identifies multiple promising future research directions.
Neuroevolutionary algorithms, automatic searches of neural network structures by means of evolutionary techniques, are computationally costly procedures. In spite of this, due to the great performance provided by the architectures which are found, these methods are widely applied. The final outcome of neuroevolutionary processes is the best structure found during the search, and the rest of the procedure is commonly omitted in the literature. However, a good amount of residual information consisting of valuable knowledge that can be extracted is also produced during these searches. In this pap…
NeuroEvolution automates the generation of Artificial Neural Networks through the application of techniques from Evolutionary Computation. The main goal of these approaches is to build models that maximize predictive performance, sometimes with an additional objective of minimizing computational complexity. Although the evolved models achieve competitive results performance-wise, their robustness to adversarial examples, which becomes a concern in security-critical scenarios, has received limited attention. In this paper, we evaluate the adversarial robustness of models found by two prominent …
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆凯特琳癌症中心）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Purpose: A core component of advancing cancer treatment research is assessing response to therapy. Doing so by hand, for example as per RECIST or RANO criteria, is tedious, time-consuming, and can miss important tumor response information; most notably, they exclude non-target lesions. We wish to assess change in a holistic fashion that includes all lesions, obtaining simple, informative, and automated assessments of tumor progression or regression. Due to often low patient enrolments in clinical trials, we wish to make response assessments with small training sets. Deep neuroevolution (DNE) c…
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆-凯特琳癌症中心）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Whereas MRI produces anatomic information about the brain, functional MRI (fMRI) tells us about neural activity within the brain, including how various regions communicate with each other. The full chorus of conversations within the brain is summarized elegantly in the adjacency matrix. Although information-rich, adjacency matrices typically provide little in the way of intuition. Whereas trained radiologists viewing anatomic MRI can readily distinguish between different kinds of brain cancer, a similar determination using adjacency matrices would exceed any expert's grasp. Artificial intellig…
Evolutionary Computation (EC) has been shown to be able to quickly train Deep Artificial Neural Networks (DNNs) to solve Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems. While a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is well-suited for exploiting reward functions that are neither deceptive nor sparse, it struggles when the reward function is either of those. To that end, Novelty Search (NS) has been shown to be able to outperform gradient-following optimizers in some cases, while under-performing in others. We propose a new algorithm: Explore-Exploit $γ$-Adaptive Learner ($E^2γAL$, or EyAL). By preserving a dynamically-…
Logic locking is a prominent technique to protect the integrity of hardware designs throughout the integrated circuit design and fabrication flow. However, in recent years, the security of locking schemes has been thoroughly challenged by the introduction of various deobfuscation attacks. As in most research branches, deep learning is being introduced in the domain of logic locking as well. Therefore, in this paper we present SnapShot: a novel attack on logic locking that is the first of its kind to utilize artificial neural networks to directly predict a key bit value from a locked synthesize…
In this paper, we reviewed Spiking neural network (SNN) integrated circuit designs and analyzed the trends among mixed-signal cores, fully digital cores and large-scale, multi-core designs. Recently reported SNN integrated circuits are compared under three broad categories: (a) Large-scale multi-core designs that have dedicated NOC for spike routing, (b) digital single-core designs and (c) mixed-signal single-core designs. Finally, we finish the paper with some directions for future progress.
Zhengzhou University（郑州大学）；Victoria University of Wellington（惠灵顿维多利亚大学）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；Andalusian Research Institute in Artificial Intelligence（安达卢西亚人工智能研究所）；Panacea Cooperative Research S.Coop.（Panacea合作研究合作社）；University of Parma（帕尔马大学）
Computer vision (CV) is a big and important field in artificial intelligence covering a wide range of applications. Image analysis is a major task in CV aiming to extract, analyse and understand the visual content of images. However, image-related tasks are very challenging due to many factors, e.g., high variations across images, high dimensionality, domain expertise requirement, and image distortions. Evolutionary computation (EC) approaches have been widely used for image analysis with significant achievement. However, there is no comprehensive survey of existing EC approaches to image anal…
Evolving Neural Networks through a Reverse Encoding Tree
BGI-Shenzhen（深圳华大基因研究院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Oxford Immune Algorithmics（牛津免疫算法公司）；Karolinska Institute（卡罗林斯卡学院）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
