Neural NEAT

Neural NEAT is a Rust library that implements Kenneth Stanley's NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) neural network evolution techniques.

Project Status

This project is still in its early stages, but contains a basic implementation capable of generating an initial population of genomes and evolving them over successive generations.

The API should be considered very unstable. It may change on little or no notice, and no API stability is guaranteed across version changes. (This will likely change as the project matures.)

Installation

cargo add neuralneat

Usage

The usual flow of evolving a neural network with Neural NEAT is to create a Pool, test each Genome in the Pool, and then spawn a new generation before repeating this process as many times as you want or need. For example:

use neuralneat::{Genome, Pool, Trainer};
use neuralneat::evaluation::TrainingData;

// To do something useful, you need to decide what your training data is!
fn load_training_data() -> Vec<TrainingData> {
    return vec![];
}

fn main() {
    let input_nodes = 5;
    let output_nodes = 1;
    // Create an initial pool of Genomes
    let mut gene_pool = Pool::with_defaults(input_nodes, output_nodes);
    
    // Load the data that will be used to train and evolve the Genomes
    let training_data: Vec<TrainingData> = load_training_data();
    
    // A Trainer can manage the process of training a population of Genomes
    // over successive generations.
    let mut trainer = Trainer::new(training_data);
    
    trainer.train(
        &mut gene_pool,
        // Train for 100 generations
        100,
    );
    // The winner!
    let best_genome = gene_pool.get_best_genome();
}

Examples

Two simple examples are included with this library:

• The adding example will train a neural network that can sum its inputs
  • There is also an adding_managed variant that trains the same type of network through the train_population interface described above.
• The compare example will train a neural network that predicts whether or not its first input is larger than its second input.

Both of these examples support both training and evaluation. Training will test a number of generations of genomes and serialize the best one to winner.json. Evaluation will take a serialized genome, feed it the given inputs, and print the output. This can be used to manually validate the trained genome, and test cases that were not part of the training data.

For example, to train a new adding genome, run:

cargo run --example adding train

You should see output similar to the following:

Evaluating generation 1
Species 0 Genome 0 increased best fitness to 0
Species 0 Genome 1 increased best fitness to 0.000030846237
Species 0 Genome 33 increased best fitness to 0.001098452
Species 0 Genome 58 increased best fitness to 0.56081927
Evaluating generation 2
Species 0 Genome 79 increased best fitness to 0.7184653
Evaluating generation 3
Species 0 Genome 79 increased best fitness to 15.087382
Evaluating generation 4
<much more of this redacted>
Evaluating generation 100
Serializing best genome to winner.json

Once this process has been completed you can evaluate the winner by hand. For example:

$ cargo run --example adding evaluate winner.json 2 5 7 9
Sum of inputs is..........23
$ cargo run --example adding evaluate winner.json 2 5 7 9
Sum of inputs is..........23
$ cargo run --example adding evaluate winner.json 2 53 7 9
Sum of inputs is..........71
$ cargo run --example adding evaluate winner.json 2 53 7 91
Sum of inputs is..........153
$ cargo run --example adding evaluate winner.json 2 53 17 91
Sum of inputs is..........163
$ cargo run --example adding evaluate winner.json 12 53 17 91
Sum of inputs is..........173
$ cargo run --example adding evaluate winner.json 12 53 33317 91
Sum of inputs is..........33473
$ cargo run --example adding evaluate winner.json 12 53 33317 9132
Sum of inputs is..........42514
$ cargo run --example adding evaluate winner.json 1211 53 33317 9132
Sum of inputs is..........43713

Note that training a network is inherently random and highly dependent on the training data you give it. Your winning genome may perform differently than above.

Documentation

Full documentation can be found at https://docs.rs/neuralneat.