Deep reinforcement learning has met noticeable successes recently for a wide range of control problems. However, this is typically based on thousands of weights and non-linearities, making solutions complex, not easily reproducible, uninterpretable and heavy. The present paper presents genetic programming approaches for building symbolic controllers. Results are competitive, in particular in the case of delayed rewards, and the solutions are lighter by orders of magnitude and much more understandable.

Algorithm selection wizards are effective and versatile tools that automatically select an optimization algorithm given high-level information about the problem and available computational resources, such as number and type of decision variables, maximal number of evaluations, possibility to parallelize evaluations, etc. State-of-the-art algorithm selection wizards are complex and difficult to improve. We propose in this work the use of automated configuration methods for improving their performance by finding better configurations of the algorithms that compose them. In particular, we use elitist iterated racing (irace) to find CMA configurations for specific artificial benchmarks that replace the hand-crafted CMA configurations currently used in the NGOpt wizard provided by the Nevergrad platform. We discuss in detail the setup of irace for the purpose of generating configurations that work well over the diverse set of problem instances within each benchmark. Our approach improves the performance of the NGOpt wizard, even on benchmark suites that were not part of the tuning by irace.