Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Outputs (169)

Synthesising Diverse and Discriminatory Sets of Instances using Novelty Search in Combinatorial Domains (2024)
Journal Article
Marrero, A., Segredo, E., Leon, C., & Hart, E. (online). Synthesising Diverse and Discriminatory Sets of Instances using Novelty Search in Combinatorial Domains. Evolutionary Computation, https://doi.org/10.1162/evco_a_00350

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.

Understanding fitness landscapes in morpho-evolution via local optima networks (2024)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Thomson, S. L., Le Goff, L., Hart, E., & Buchanan, E. (2024, July). Understanding fitness landscapes in morpho-evolution via local optima networks. Presented at Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2024), Melbourne, Australia

Morpho-Evolution (ME) refers to the simultaneous optimisation of a robot's design and controller to maximise performance given a task and environment. Many genetic encodings have been proposed which are capable of representing design and control. Pre... Read More about Understanding fitness landscapes in morpho-evolution via local optima networks.

Learning Descriptors for Novelty-Search Based Instance Generation via Meta-evolution (2024)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Marrero, A., Segredo, E., León, C., & Hart, E. (2024, July). Learning Descriptors for Novelty-Search Based Instance Generation via Meta-evolution. Presented at ACM GECCO 2024, Melbourne, Australia

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)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Montague, K., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2024, April). A Hierarchical Approach to Evolving Behaviour-Trees for Swarm Control. Presented at EvoStar 2024, Aberystwyth

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)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Renau, Q., & Hart, E. (2024, April). On the Utility of Probing Trajectories for Algorithm-Selection. Presented at EvoStar 2024, Aberystwyth, UK

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.

Improving Algorithm-Selection and Performance-Prediction via Learning Discriminating Training Samples (2024)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Renau, Q., & Hart, E. (2024, July). Improving Algorithm-Selection and Performance-Prediction via Learning Discriminating Training Samples. Presented at GECCO 2024, Melbourne, USA

The choice of input-data used to train algorithm-selection models is recognised as being a critical part of the model success. Recently, feature-free methods for algorithm-selection that use short trajec-tories obtained from running a solver as input... Read More about Improving Algorithm-Selection and Performance-Prediction via Learning Discriminating Training Samples.

Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search (2024)
Journal Article
Arza, E., Le Goff, L. K., & Hart, E. (online). 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.

Evolving Behavior Allocations in Robot Swarms (2024)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Hallauer, S., Nitschke, G., & Hart, E. (2023, December). Evolving Behavior Allocations in Robot Swarms. Presented at IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI 2023), Mexico City, Mexico

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., Carlo, M. D., Angus, M., Woolley, R., Gan, Z., Winfield, A. F., Timmis, J., Eiben, A. E., & Tyrrell, A. M. (online). Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Desi

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.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Environmental Sustainability: Monitoring Terrestrial Biodiversity (2023)
Preprint / 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.