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deep surrogate models

A deep surrogate model is a deep neural network trained to approximate the input-output behavior of a computationally expensive or complex system, simulation, or evaluation function. By learning patterns and nonlinear relationships from data produced by ground-truth processes, such as physical experiments, numerical simulations, or agent behavior evaluations, a deep surrogate model delivers rapid predictions at a fraction of the original computational cost. These models are commonly applied in surrogate-assisted optimization, scientific computing, engineering design, and reinforcement learning, enabling efficient iterative testing, exploration, and decision-making where repeated execution of the true underlying system would be prohibitively slow or resource-intensive.

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Deep Surrogate Assisted Generation of Environments

Deep Surrogate Assisted Generation of Environments

Varun Bhatt, Bryon Tjanaka, Matthew C. Fontaine, Stefanos Nikolaidis

OrganizationsUniversity of Southern California

Why you should read this

Proposes a sample-efficient quality diversity framework that uses deep surrogate models to predict agent behaviors, drastically reducing expensive environment simulations when generating diverse test levels for reinforcement learning and planning agents.

Recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) has started producing generally capable agents that can solve a distribution of complex environments. These agents are typically tested on fixed, human-authored environments. On the other hand, quality diversity (QD) optimization has been proven to be an effective component of environment generation algorithms, which can generate collections of high-quality environments that are diverse in the resulting agent behaviors. However, these algorithms require potentially expensive simulations of agents on newly generated environments. We propose Deep Surrogate Assisted Generation of Environments (DSAGE), a sample-efficient QD environment generation algorithm that maintains a deep surrogate model for predicting agent behaviors in new environments. Results in two benchmark domains show that DSAGE significantly outperforms existing QD environment generation algorithms in discovering collections of environments that elicit diverse behaviors of a state-of-the-art RL agent and a planning agent. Our source code and videos are available at https://dsagepaper.github.io/

Added

2026-09-26