Cooperative Coevolutionary Spatial Topologies for Autoencoder Training

Abstract

Training autoencoders is non-trivial. Convergence to the identity function or overfitting are common pitfalls. Population based algorithms like coevolutionary algorithms can provide diversity. To more robustly train autoencoders, we introduce a novel cooperative coevolutionary algorithm that exploits a spatial topology. We investigate the impact of algorithm parameters and design choices on the performance. On a simple tunable benchmark problem we observe that the performance can be improved over that of an conventionally trained autoencoder. However, the training convergence can be slow, despite the final model performance being competitive with a conventional autoencoder.