Continuous Program Search

Matthew Siper, Muhammad Umair Nasir, Ahmed Khalifa, Lisa Soros, Jay Azhang and Julian Togelius

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Genetic Programming yields interpretable programs, but small syntactic mutations can induce large, unpredictable behavioral shifts, degrading locality and sample efficiency. We frame this as an operator-design problem: learn a continuous program space where latent distance has behavioral meaning, then design mutation operators that exploit this structure without changing the evolutionary optimizer. We make locality measurable by tracking action-level divergence under controlled latent perturbations, identifying an empirical trust region for behavior-local continuous variation. Using a compact trading-strategy DSL with four semantic components (long/short entry and exit), we learn a matching block-factorized embedding and compare isotropic Gaussian mutation over the full latent space to geometry-compiled mutation that restricts updates to semantically paired entry--exit subspaces and proposes directions using a learned flow-based model trained on logged mutation outcomes. Under identical $(\mu+\lambda)$ evolution strategies and fixed evaluation budgets across five assets, the learned mutation operator discovers strong strategies using an order of magnitude fewer evaluations and achieves the highest median out-of-sample Sharpe ratio. Although isotropic mutation occasionally attains higher peak performance, geometry-compiled mutation yields faster, more reliable progress, demonstrating that semantically aligned mutation can substantially improve search efficiency without modifying the underlying evolutionary algorithm.

Date: 2026-02
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