Minimalist Genetic Programming
Quick Answer
This paper shows that Minimalist Genetic Programming (MGP) redefines genetic programming by framing it as a syntactic derivation task, utilizing a $MERGE$ operator to construct complex structures.
Quick Take
Benchmarked against symbolic regression tasks, MGP consistently outperforms standard GP systems, achieving exact models where traditional methods struggle due to bloat.
Key Points
- MGP uses a binary set formation operator called $MERGE$ for incremental construction.
- The approach is inspired by the Minimalist Program in human language.
- MGP benchmarks show superior performance in symbolic regression tasks.
- Standard GP systems often struggle with bloat in similar tasks.
- MGP's insights into minimalism suggest further exploration in program induction.
Paper Resources
Article Content
From source RSS / original summaryarXiv:2606. 10237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Genetic programming (GP) is based on two important insights. First, that any learning task can fundamentally be posed as a program induction problem, where the goal is to construct a symbolic hierarchical model that is expressed as a syntax tree. Second, to pose this task as a search problem, and use evolution to locate the desired model. Since it was proposed, GP has produced notable results in a wide range of tasks and problem domains.
This work presents an alternative view by modifying the second core insight of GP, posing the problem as a syntactic derivation task instead. In particular, this paper presents Minimalist Genetic Programming (MGP), an algorithm that like GP is biologically inspired, but instead of evolution it takes inspiration from the Minimalist Program to human language, in which syntax is understood as an optimal solution to the problem of linking two other mental systems.
In minimalism, the core computational process is a binary set formation operator called $MERGE$, than can be used to incrementally construct complex syntactic structures using a simple Markovian process. MGP is able to discover the core building blocks of the symbolic expressions, and to incrementally combined them using $MERGE$. The proposed system is benchmarked on symbolic regression tasks that are known to be difficult to solve with standard GP systems because of the propensity for bloat.
Results show that when a proper lexicon of atomic syntactic objects are chosen, MGP is able to consistently produce the exact ground truth model on a set of symbolic regression where standard GP struggles to do the same. The insights provided by minimalism are shown to be relevant to the problem of program induction, and should be explored further based on the potential exhibited by MGP in this work.
Want this in your inbox every morning?
Daily brief at your local 8am — bilingual EN/中文, free.
More from arXiv cs.AI
See more →HOBA: Hierarchical On-Policy Bidding Agents for Adaptive Online Advertising
HOBA (Hierarchical On-policy Bidding Agents) is a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that enhances online advertising bidding systems by improving adaptability and reducing hyperparameter tuning costs. It utilizes a for hyperparameter inference, a SARSA agent for expert model selection, and a dynamic expert pool for bid execution, achieving a +3.6% increase in target cost during large-scale deployment and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines on AuctionNet.