Learning Descriptors for Novelty-Search Based Instance Generation via Meta-evolution (2024)
Conference Proceeding
Marrero, A., Segredo, E., León, C., & Hart, E. (in press). Learning Descriptors for Novelty-Search Based Instance Generation via Meta-evolution. In Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO ’24), July 14–18, 2024, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. https://doi.org/10.1145/3638529.3654028

The ability to generate example instances from a domain is important in order to benchmark algorithms and to generate data that covers an instance-space in order to train machine-learning models for algorithm selection. Quality-Diversity (QD) algorit... Read More about Learning Descriptors for Novelty-Search Based Instance Generation via Meta-evolution.

A Hierarchical Approach to Evolving Behaviour-Trees for Swarm Control (2024)
Conference Proceeding
Montague, K., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2024). A Hierarchical Approach to Evolving Behaviour-Trees for Swarm Control. In S. Smith, J. Correia, & C. Cintrano (Eds.), Applications of Evolutionary Computation: 27th European Conference, EvoApplications 2024, Held as Part of EvoStar 2024, Aberystwyth, UK, April 3–5, 2024, Proceedings, Part I (178-193). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56852-7_12

Behaviour trees (BTs) are commonly used as controllers in robotic swarms due their modular composition and to the fact that they can be easily interpreted by humans. From an algorithmic perspective, an additional advantage is that extra modules can e... Read More about A Hierarchical Approach to Evolving Behaviour-Trees for Swarm Control.

On the Utility of Probing Trajectories for Algorithm-Selection (2024)
Conference Proceeding
Renau, Q., & Hart, E. (2024). On the Utility of Probing Trajectories for Algorithm-Selection. In Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2024 (98-114). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56852-7_7

Machine-learning approaches to algorithm-selection typically take data describing an instance as input. Input data can take the form of features derived from the instance description or fitness landscape , or can be a direct representation of the ins... Read More about On the Utility of Probing Trajectories for Algorithm-Selection.

Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search (2024)
Journal Article
Arza, E., Le Goff, L. K., & Hart, E. (in press). Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search. ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, https://doi.org/10.1145/3653024

Lengthy evaluation times are common in many optimization problems such as direct policy search tasks, especially when they involve conducting evaluations in the physical world, e.g. in robotics applications. Often when evaluating solution over a fixe... Read More about Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search.

Synthesising Diverse and Discriminatory Sets of Instances using Novelty Search in Combinatorial Domains (2024)
Journal Article
Marrero, A., Segredo, E., Leon, C., & Hart, E. (in press). Synthesising Diverse and Discriminatory Sets of Instances using Novelty Search in Combinatorial Domains. Evolutionary Computation,

Gathering sufficient instance data to either train algorithm-selection models or understand algorithm footprints within an instance space can be challenging. We propose an approach to generating synthetic instances that are tailored to perform well w... Read More about Synthesising Diverse and Discriminatory Sets of Instances using Novelty Search in Combinatorial Domains.

How Much do Robots Understand Rudeness? Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction (2024)
Conference Proceeding
Orme, M., Yu, Y., & Tan, Z. (in press). How Much do Robots Understand Rudeness? Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction.

This paper concerns the pressing need to understand and manage inappropriate language within the evolving human-robot interaction (HRI) landscape. As intelligent systems and robots transition from controlled laboratory settings to everyday households... Read More about How Much do Robots Understand Rudeness? Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction.

Can Federated Models Be Rectified Through Learning Negative Gradients? (2024)
Conference Proceeding
Tahir, A., Tan, Z., & Babaagba, K. O. (2024). Can Federated Models Be Rectified Through Learning Negative Gradients?. In Big Data Technologies and Applications (18-32). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52265-9_2

Federated Learning (FL) is a method to train machine learning (ML) models in a decentralised manner, while preserving the privacy of data from multiple clients. However, FL is vulnerable to malicious attacks, such as poisoning attacks, and is challen... Read More about Can Federated Models Be Rectified Through Learning Negative Gradients?.

Evolving Behavior Allocations in Robot Swarms (2024)
Conference Proceeding
Hallauer, S., Nitschke, G., & Hart, E. (2024). Evolving Behavior Allocations in Robot Swarms. In 2023 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) (1526-1531). https://doi.org/10.1109/SSCI52147.2023.10371934

Behavioral diversity is known to benefit problem-solving in biological social systems such as insect colonies and human societies, as well as in artificial distributed systems including large-scale software and swarm-robotics systems. We investigate... Read More about Evolving Behavior Allocations in Robot Swarms.

Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces (2023)
Journal Article
Li, W., Buchanan, E., Goff, L. K. L., Hart, E., Hale, M. F., Wei, B., …Tyrrell, A. M. (in press). Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, https://doi.org/10.1109/tevc.2023.3316363

Jointly optimising both the body and brain of a robot is known to be a challenging task, especially when attempting to evolve designs in simulation that will subsequently be built in the real world. To address this, it is increasingly common to combi... Read More about Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces.

Can HP-protein folding be solved with genetic algorithms? Maybe not (2023)
Conference Proceeding
Jansen, R., Horn, R., van Eck, O., Version, K., Thomson, S. L., & van den Berg, D. (2023). Can HP-protein folding be solved with genetic algorithms? Maybe not. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (131-140). https://doi.org/10.5220/0012248500003595

Genetic algorithms might not be able to solve the HP-protein folding problem because creating random individuals for an initial population is very hard, if not impossible. The reason for this, is that the expected number of constraint violations incr... Read More about Can HP-protein folding be solved with genetic algorithms? Maybe not.

Too Constrained for Genetic Algorithms. Too Hard for Evolutionary Computing. The Traveling Tournament Problem. (2023)
Conference Proceeding
Verduin, K., Thomson, S. L., & van den Berg, D. (2023). Too Constrained for Genetic Algorithms. Too Hard for Evolutionary Computing. The Traveling Tournament Problem. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (246-257). https://doi.org/10.5220/0012192100003595

Unlike other NP-hard problems, the constraints on the traveling tournament problem are so pressing that it’s hardly possible to randomly generate a valid solution, for example, to use in a genetic algorithm’s initial population. In this study, we ran... Read More about Too Constrained for Genetic Algorithms. Too Hard for Evolutionary Computing. The Traveling Tournament Problem..

The Opaque Nature of Intelligence and the Pursuit of Explainable AI (2023)
Conference Proceeding
Thomson, S. L., van Stein, N., van den Berg, D., & van Leeuwen, C. (2023). The Opaque Nature of Intelligence and the Pursuit of Explainable AI. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (555-564). https://doi.org/10.5220/0012249500003595

When artificial intelligence is used for making decisions, people are more likely to accept those decisions if they can be made intelligible to the public. This understanding has led to the emerging field of explainable artificial intelligence. We re... Read More about The Opaque Nature of Intelligence and the Pursuit of Explainable AI.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Environmental Sustainability: Monitoring Terrestrial Biodiversity (2023)
Working Paper
Pringle, S., Davies, Z. G., Goddard, M. A., Dallimer, M., Hart, E., Le Goff, L., & Langdale, S. J. (2023). Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Environmental Sustainability: Monitoring Terrestrial Biodiversity

Welcome to the UK-RAS White paper Series on Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS). This is one of the core activities of UK-RAS Network, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). By Bringing together academic centres o... Read More about Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Environmental Sustainability: Monitoring Terrestrial Biodiversity.

Learning-Based Neural Ant Colony Optimization (2023)
Conference Proceeding
Liu, Y., Qiu, J., Hart, E., Yu, Y., Gan, Z., & Li, W. (2023). Learning-Based Neural Ant Colony Optimization. In GECCO 2023: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (47-55). https://doi.org/10.1145/3583131.3590483

In this paper, we propose a new ant colony optimization algorithm , called learning-based neural ant colony optimization (LN-ACO), which incorporates an "intelligent ant". This intelligent ant contains a convolutional neural network pre-trained on a... Read More about Learning-Based Neural Ant Colony Optimization.

Generating diverse and discriminatory knapsack instances by searching for novelty in variable dimensions of feature-space (2023)
Conference Proceeding
Marrero, A., Segredo, E., Hart, E., Bossek, J., & Neumann, A. (2023). Generating diverse and discriminatory knapsack instances by searching for novelty in variable dimensions of feature-space. In GECCO '23: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (312-320). https://doi.org/10.1145/3583131.3590504

Generating new instances via evolutionary methods is commonly used to create new benchmarking data-sets, with a focus on attempting to cover an instance-space as completely as possible. Recent approaches have exploited Quality-Diversity methods to ev... Read More about Generating diverse and discriminatory knapsack instances by searching for novelty in variable dimensions of feature-space.

MedOptNet: Meta-Learning Framework for Few-shot Medical Image Classification (2023)
Journal Article
Lu, L., Cui, X., Tan, Z., & Wu, Y. (in press). MedOptNet: Meta-Learning Framework for Few-shot Medical Image Classification. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, https://doi.org/10.1109/TCBB.2023.3284846

In the medical research domain, limited data and high annotation costs have made efficient classification under few-shot conditions a popular research area. This paper proposes a meta-learning framework, termed MedOptNet, for few-shot medical image c... Read More about MedOptNet: Meta-Learning Framework for Few-shot Medical Image Classification.

DanceGraph: A Complementary Architecture for Synchronous Dancing Online (2023)
Presentation / Conference
Sinclair, D., Ademola, A. V., Koniaris, B., & Mitchell, K. (2023, May). DanceGraph: A Complementary Architecture for Synchronous Dancing Online. Paper presented at 36th International Computer Animation & Social Agents (CASA) 2023, Limassol, Cyprus

DanceGraph is an architecture for synchronized online dancing overcoming the latency of net-worked body pose sharing. We break down this challenge by developing a real-time bandwidth-efficient architecture to minimize lag and reduce the timeframe of... Read More about DanceGraph: A Complementary Architecture for Synchronous Dancing Online.

A Quality-Diversity Approach to Evolving a Repertoire of Diverse Behaviour-Trees in Robot Swarms (2023)
Conference Proceeding
Montague, K., Hart, E., Paechter, B., & Nitschke, G. (2023). A Quality-Diversity Approach to Evolving a Repertoire of Diverse Behaviour-Trees in Robot Swarms. In J. Correia, S. Smith, & R. Qaddoura (Eds.), Applications of Evolutionary Computation: 26th European Conference, EvoApplications 2023, Held as Part of EvoStar 2023, Brno, Czech Republic, April 12–14, 2023, Proceedings (145-160). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30229-9_10

Designing controllers for a swarm of robots such that collabo-rative behaviour emerges at the swarm level is known to be challenging. Evolutionary approaches have proved promising, with attention turning more recently to evolving repertoires of dive... Read More about A Quality-Diversity Approach to Evolving a Repertoire of Diverse Behaviour-Trees in Robot Swarms.

DIGNEA: A tool to generate diverse and discriminatory instance suites for optimisation domains (2023)
Journal Article
Marrero, A., Segredo, E., León, C., & Hart, E. (2023). DIGNEA: A tool to generate diverse and discriminatory instance suites for optimisation domains. SoftwareX, 22, Article 101355. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2023.101355

To advance research in the development of optimisation algorithms, it is crucial to have access to large test-beds of diverse and discriminatory instances from a domain that can highlight strengths and weaknesses of different algorithms. The DIGNEA t... Read More about DIGNEA: A tool to generate diverse and discriminatory instance suites for optimisation domains.

Automated Algorithm Selection: from Feature-Based to Feature-Free Approaches (2023)
Journal Article
Alissa, M., Sim, K., & Hart, E. (2023). Automated Algorithm Selection: from Feature-Based to Feature-Free Approaches. Journal of Heuristics, 29(1), 1-38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-022-09505-4

We propose a novel technique for algorithm-selection, applicable to optimisation domains in which there is implicit sequential information encapsulated in the data, e.g., in online bin-packing. Specifically we train two types of recurrent neural netw... Read More about Automated Algorithm Selection: from Feature-Based to Feature-Free Approaches.