abstract = "Evolutionary deep learning (EDL) as a hot topic in
recent years aims at using evolutionary computation
(EC) techniques to address existing issues in deep
learning. Most existing work focuses on employing EC
methods for evolving hyper-parameters, deep structures
or weights for neural networks (ANN). Genetic
programming (GP) as an EC method is able to achieve
deep learning due to the characteristics of its
representation. However, many current GP-based EDL
methods are limited to binary image classification.
This paper proposed a new GP-based EDL method with
convolution operators (COGP) for feature learning on
binary and multi-class image classification. A novel
flexible program structure is developed to allow COGP
to evolve solutions with deep or shallow structures.
Associated with the program structure, a new function
set and a new terminal set are developed in COGP. The
experimental results on six different image
classification data sets of varying difficulty
demonstrated that COGP ac",