Neural Genetic Search in Discrete Spaces

Hyeonah Kim, Sanghyeok Choi, Jiwoo Son, Jinkyoo Park, Changhyun Kwon

Track: long paper (up to 8 pages)

Keywords: Deep Learning, Sequential generation, Search, Decoding

TL;DR: We propose neural genetic search (NGS), a new search method for sequential generative models inspired by genetic algorithms.

Abstract: Effective search methods are crucial for improving the performance of deep generative models at test time. In this paper, we introduce a novel test-time search method, Neural Genetic Search (NGS), which incorporates the evolutionary mechanism of genetic algorithms into the generation procedure of deep models. The core idea behind NGS is its crossover, which is defined as parent-conditioned generation using trained generative models. This approach offers a versatile and easy-to-implement search algorithm for deep generative models. We demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of NGS through experiments across three distinct domains: routing problems, adversarial prompt generation for language models, and molecular design.

Submission Number: 41