The First Mathematical Proof That Crossover Gives Super-Constant Performance Gains For the NSGA-II

08/18/2022

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by   Benjamin Doerr, et al.

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Very recently, the first mathematical runtime analyses for the NSGA-II, the most common multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, have been conducted (Zheng, Liu, Doerr (AAAI 2022)). Continuing this research direction, we prove that the NSGA-II optimizes the OneJumpZeroJump benchmark asymptotically faster when crossover is employed. This is the first time such an advantage of crossover is proven for the NSGA-II. Our arguments can be transferred to single-objective optimization. They then prove that crossover can speed-up the (μ+1) genetic algorithm in a different way and more pronounced than known before. Our experiments confirm the added value of crossover and show that the observed speed-ups are even larger than what our proofs can guarantee.