Quality Diversity under Sparse Interaction and Sparse Reward: Application to Grasping in Robotics

Johann Huber et al.

Evolutionary Computation2025https://doi.org/10.1162/evco_a_00363article
AJG 3
Weight
0.41

What the paper says

Quality-Diversity (QD) methods are algorithms that aim to generate a set of diverse and highperforming solutions to a given problem. Originally developed for evolutionary robotics, most QD studies are conducted on a limited set of domains'mainly applied to locomotion, where the fitness and the behavior signal are dense. Grasping is a crucial task for manipulation in robotics. Despite the efforts of many research communities, this task is yet to be solved. Grasping cumulates unprecedented challenges in QD literature: it suffers from reward sparsity, behavioral sparsity, and behavior space misalignment. The present work studies how QD can address grasping. Experiments have been conducted on 15 different methods on 10 grasping domains, corresponding to 2 different robot-gripper setups and 5 standard objects. The obtained results show that MAP-Elites variants that select successful solutions in priority outperform all the compared methods on the studied metrics by a large margin. We also found experimental evidence that sparse interaction can lead to deceptive novelty. To our knowledge, the ability to efficiently produce examples of grasping trajectories demonstrated in this work has no precedent in the literature.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1162/evco_a_00363

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@article{johann2025,
  title        = {{Quality Diversity under Sparse Interaction and Sparse Reward: Application to Grasping in Robotics}},
  author       = {Johann Huber et al.},
  journal      = {Evolutionary Computation},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1162/evco_a_00363},
}

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Evidence weight

0.41

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.25 × 0.4 = 0.10
M · momentum0.55 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.