# Monte Carlo Elites: Quality-Diversity Selection as a Multi-Armed Bandit Problem

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08781/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Differentiable Quality Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03894/) (2021)
- [Covariance Matrix Adaptation MAP-Annealing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10752/) (2022)
- [Quality Diversity through Human Feedback: Towards Open-Ended Diversity-Driven Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12103/) (2023)
- [Measuring Diversity of Game Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15192/) (2024)
- [How to Fill the Optimum Set? Population Gradient Descent with Harmless Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08376/) (2022)
- [GEAR: Genetic AutoResearch for Agentic Code Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13874/) (2026)
- [Towards QD-suite: developing a set of benchmarks for Quality-Diversity algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03207/) (2022)
- [Quality-Diversity with Limited Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03731/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Quality-Diversity Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05769/) (2024)
- [Agentic Method for Deterministic Validation of Legacy Code Migration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28271/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A core challenge of evolutionary search is the need to balance between exploration of the search space and exploitation of highly fit regions. Quality-diversity search has explicitly walked this tightrope between a population's diversity and its quality. This paper extends a popular quality-diversity search algorithm, MAP-Elites, by treating the selection of parents as a multi-armed bandit problem. Using variations of the upper-confidence bound to select parents from under-explored but potentially rewarding areas of the search space can accelerate the discovery of new regions as well as improve its archive's total quality. The paper tests an indirect measure of quality for parent selection: the survival rate of a parent's offspring. Results show that maintaining a balance between exploration and exploitation leads to the most diverse and high-quality set of solutions in three different testbeds.