Discovering Quality-Diversity Algorithms via Meta-Black-Box Optimization

Quality-Diversity has emerged as a powerful family of evolutionary algorithms that generate diverse populations of high-performing solutions by implementing local competition principles inspired by biological evolution. While these algorithms successfully foster diversity and innovation, their specific mechanisms rely on heuristics, such as grid-based competition in MAP-Elites or nearest-neighbor competition in unstructured archives. In this work, we propose a fundamentally different approach: using meta-learning to automatically discover novel Quality-Diversity algorithms. By parameterizing the competition rules using attention-based neural architectures, we evolve new algorithms that capture complex relationships between individuals in the descriptor space. Our discovered algorithms demonstrate competitive or superior performance compared to established Quality-Diversity baselines while exhibiting strong generalization to higher dimensions, larger populations, and out-of-distribution domains like robot control. Notably, even when optimized solely for fitness, these algorithms naturally maintain diverse populations, suggesting meta-learning rediscovers that diversity is fundamental to effective optimization.

@article{faldor2025_2502.02190,
  title={ Discovering Quality-Diversity Algorithms via Meta-Black-Box Optimization },
  author={ Maxence Faldor and Robert Tjarko Lange and Antoine Cully },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.02190},
  year={ 2025 }
}