Was Tournament Selection All We Ever Needed? A Critical Reflection on Lexicase Selection

Created by W.Langdon from gp-bibliography.bib Revision:1.8229

@InProceedings{geiger:2025:EuroGP,

• author = "Alina Geiger and Martin Briesch and Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf",
• title = "Was Tournament Selection All We Ever Needed? A Critical Reflection on Lexicase Selection",
• booktitle = "European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2025",
• year = "2025",
• editor = "Bing Xue and Luca Manzoni and Illya Bakurov",
• series = "LNCS",
• address = "Trieste",
• month = "23-25 " # apr,
• publisher = "Springer Nature",
• note = "Forthcoming",
• keywords = "genetic algorithms, genetic programming, Tournament Selection, Lexicase Selection, Down-Sampling, Symbolic Regression",
• abstract = "The success of lexicase selection has led to various extensions, including its combination with down-sampling, which further increased performance. However, recent work found that down-sampling also leads to significant improvements in the performance of tournament selection. This raises the question of whether tournament selection combined with down-sampling is the better choice, given its faster running times. To address this question, we run a set of experiments comparing $$\epsilon$$-lexicase and tournament selection with different down-sampling techniques on synthetic problems of varying noise levels and problem sizes as well as real-world symbolic regression problems. Overall, we find that down-sampling improves generalisation and performance even when compared over the same number of generations. This means that down-sampling is beneficial even with way fewer fitness evaluations. Additionally, down-sampling successfully reduces code growth. We observe that population diversity increases for tournament selection when combined with down-sampling. Further, we find that tournament selection and $$\epsilon$$-lexicase selection with down-sampling perform similar, while tournament selection is significantly faster. We conclude that tournament selection should be further analysed and improved in future work instead of only focusing on the improvement of lexicase variants.",
• notes = "also known as \cite{paper_99_tournament_all_we_needed}

  Part of \cite{Xue:2025:GP} EuroGP'2025 held in conjunction with EvoCOP2025, EvoMusArt2025 and EvoApplications2025",

}

Genetic Programming entries for Alina Geiger Martin Briesch Dominik Sobania Franz Rothlauf

Citations