Question: How does Progressive Dynamic Hurdles work?
Answer: It begins as ordinary tournament selection evolutionary architecture search with early stopping, with each child model training for a relatively small $s_0$ number of steps before being evaluated for fitness. However, after a predetermined number of child models, $m$ , have been evaluated, a hurdle, $h_0$ , is created by calculating the the mean fitness of the current population. For the next $m$ child models produced, models that achieve a fitness greater than $h_0$ after $s_0$ train steps are granted an additional $s_1$ steps of training and then are evaluated again to determine their final fitness. Once another $m$ models have been considered this way, another hurdle, $h_1$ , is constructed by calculating the mean fitness of all members of the current population that were trained for the maximum number of steps. For the next $m$ child models, training and evaluation continues in the same fashion, except models with fitness greater than $m$0 after $m$1 steps of training are granted an additional $m$2 number of train steps, before being evaluated for their final fitness. This process is repeated until a satisfactory number of maximum training steps is reached.