Leveraging More of Biology in Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we survey the use of additional biologically inspired mechanisms, principles, and concepts in the area of evolutionary reinforcement learning (ERL). While recent years have witnessed the emergence of a swath of metaphor-laden approaches, many merely echo old algorithms through novel metaphors. Simultaneously, numerous promising ideas from evolutionary biology and related areas, ripe for exploitation within evolutionary machine learning, remain in relative obscurity. To address this gap, we provide a comprehensive analysis of innovative, often unorthodox approaches in ERL that leverage additional bio-inspired elements. Furthermore, we pinpoint research directions in the field with the largest potential to yield impactful outcomes and discuss classes of problems that could benefit the most from such research.