This volume comprises the Late-Breaking Abstracts accepted for the Evo* 2023 Conference, hosted in Brno (Czech Republic), from April 12th to 14th. These abstracts were featured in both short talks and the conference's poster session, offering insights into ongoing research and preliminary findings exploring the application of various Evolutionary Computation approaches and other Nature-Inspired techniques to real-world problems. These contributions represent promising developments, highlighting forthcoming advances and applications in the field of nature-inspired methods, particularly Evolutionary Algorithms.

Neural networks are widely used in all kinds of data processing, especially on seemingly unfeasible tasks such as image [15] and language recognition [10], as well as applications in medicine [16], and prediction of stock markets [6], just to mention a few. Khan et al. [14] provide a survey of such applications, a mathematically oriented textbook concerning structural issues related to Deep Neural Networks is provided by [3]. Neural networks are nowadays also made use of in safety-critical systems like autonomous driving [8] or power grid management. In such a setting, when security issues become important, aspects of certification come into play [7, 11, 17]. If we for example want provable guarantees for certain scenarios to be unreachable, we first need to formulate them as constraints and precisely state for which property of a network we want verification. In the present paper we are interested in studying certain verification problems for NNs in form of particular robustness and minimization problems such as: How will a network react to a small perturbation of the input [9]? And how likely is a network to change the classification of an input that is altered a little? These probabilities are crucial when for example a self-driving car is supposed to recognize a speed limit, and they have already been tackled in practical settings by simulations and heuristic algorithms.

In this article we present Enhanced Rhetorical Structure Theory (eRST), a new theoretical framework for computational discourse analysis, based on an expansion of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The framework encompasses discourse relation graphs with tree-breaking, nonprojective and concurrent relations, as well as implicit and explicit signals which give explainable rationales to our analyses. We survey shortcomings of RST and other existing frameworks, such as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) and Discourse Dependencies, and address these using constructs in the proposed theory. We provide annotation, search and visualization tools for data, and present and evaluate a freely available corpus of English annotated according to our framework, encompassing 12 spoken and written genres with over 200K tokens. Finally, we discuss automatic parsing, evaluation metrics and applications for data in our framework.

Human-robot teams involve humans and robots collaborating to achieve tasks under various environmental conditions. Successful teaming will require robots to adapt autonomously to a human teammate's internal state. An important element of such adaptation is the ability to estimate the human teammates' workload in unknown situations. Existing workload models use machine learning to model the relationships between physiological metrics and workload; however, these methods are susceptible to individual differences and are heavily influenced by other factors. These methods cannot generalize to unknown tasks, as they rely on standard machine learning approaches that assume data consists of independent and identically distributed (IID) samples. This assumption does not necessarily hold for estimating workload for new tasks. A survey of non-IID machine learning techniques is presented, where commonly used techniques are evaluated using three criteria: portability, model complexity, and adaptability. These criteria are used to argue which techniques are most applicable for estimating workload for unknown tasks in dynamic, real-time environments.

In the approximately century-long journey of robotics, humanoid robots made their debut around six decades ago. The rapid advancements in generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and large multimodal models (LMMs) have reignited interest in humanoids, steering them towards real-time, interactive, and multimodal designs and applications. This resurgence unveils boundless opportunities for AI robotics and novel applications, paving the way for automated, real-time and humane interactions with humanoid advisers, educators, medical professionals, caregivers, and receptionists. However, while current humanoid robots boast human-like appearances, they have yet to embody true humaneness, remaining distant from achieving human-like intelligence. In our comprehensive review, we delve into the intricate landscape of AI robotics and AI humanoid robots in particular, exploring the challenges, perspectives and directions in transitioning from human-looking to humane humanoids and fostering human-like robotics. This endeavour synergizes the advancements in LLMs, LMMs, generative AI, and human-level AI with humanoid robotics, omniverse, and decentralized AI, ushering in the era of AI humanoids and humanoid AI.

Given the uncertainty surrounding how existing explainability methods for autonomous vehicles (AVs) meet the diverse needs of stakeholders, a thorough investigation is imperative to determine the contexts requiring explanations and suitable interaction strategies. A comprehensive review becomes crucial to assess the alignment of current approaches with the varied interests and expectations within the AV ecosystem. This study presents a review to discuss the complexities associated with explanation generation and presentation to facilitate the development of more effective and inclusive explainable AV systems. Our investigation led to categorising existing literature into three primary topics: explanatory tasks, explanatory information, and explanatory information communication. Drawing upon our insights, we have proposed a comprehensive roadmap for future research centred on (i) knowing the interlocutor, (ii) generating timely explanations, (ii) communicating human-friendly explanations, and (iv) continuous learning. Our roadmap is underpinned by principles of responsible research and innovation, emphasising the significance of diverse explanation requirements. To effectively tackle the challenges associated with implementing explainable AV systems, we have delineated various research directions, including the development of privacy-preserving data integration, ethical frameworks, real-time analytics, human-centric interaction design, and enhanced cross-disciplinary collaborations. By exploring these research directions, the study aims to guide the development and deployment of explainable AVs, informed by a holistic understanding of user needs, technological advancements, regulatory compliance, and ethical considerations, thereby ensuring safer and more trustworthy autonomous driving experiences.

Scanpath classification is an area in eye tracking research with possible applications in medicine, manufacturing as well as training systems for students in various domains. In this paper we propose a trainable feature extraction module for deep neural networks. The purpose of this module is to transform a scanpath into a feature vector which is directly useable for the deep neural network architecture. Based on the backpropagated error of the deep neural network, the feature extraction module adapts its parameters to improve the classification performance. Therefore, our feature extraction module is jointly trainable with the deep neural network. The motivation to this feature extraction module is based on classical histogram-based approaches which usually compute distributions over a scanpath. We evaluated our module on three public datasets and compared it to the state of the art approaches.

Stereophotogrammetry is an emerging technique of scene understanding. Its origins go back to at least the 1800s when people first started to investigate using photographs to measure the physical properties of the world. Since then, thousands of approaches have been explored. The classic geometric techniques of Shape from Stereo is built on using geometry to define constraints on scene and camera geometry and then solving the non-linear systems of equations. More recent work has taken an entirely different approach, using end-to-end deep learning without any attempt to explicitly model the geometry. In this survey, we explore the overlap for geometric-based and deep learning-based frameworks. We compare and contrast geometry enforcing constraints integrated into a deep learning framework for depth estimation or other closely related problems. We present a new taxonomy for prevalent geometry enforcing constraints used in modern deep learning frameworks. We also present insightful observations and potential future research directions.

Objectives: Medical research faces substantial challenges from noisy labels attributed to factors like inter-expert variability and machine-extracted labels. Despite this, the adoption of label noise management remains limited, and label noise is largely ignored. To this end, there is a critical need to conduct a scoping review focusing on the problem space. This scoping review aims to comprehensively review label noise management in deep learning-based medical prediction problems, which includes label noise detection, label noise handling, and evaluation. Research involving label uncertainty is also included. Methods: Our scoping review follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. We searched 4 databases, including PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Google Scholar, and Semantic Scholar. Our search terms include "noisy label AND medical / healthcare / clinical", "un-certainty AND medical / healthcare / clinical", and "noise AND medical / healthcare / clinical". Results: A total of 60 papers met inclusion criteria between 2016 and 2023. A series of practical questions in medical research are investigated. These include the sources of label noise, the impact of label noise, the detection of label noise, label noise handling techniques, and their evaluation. Categorization of both label noise detection methods and handling techniques are provided. Discussion: From a methodological perspective, we observe that the medical community has been up to date with the broader deep-learning community, given that most techniques have been evaluated on medical data. We recommend considering label noise as a standard element in medical research, even if it is not dedicated to handling noisy labels. Initial experiments can start with easy-to-implement methods, such as noise-robust loss functions, weighting, and curriculum learning.

Is there a foreign language describing protein sequences and structures simultaneously? Protein structures, represented by continuous 3D points, have long posed a challenge due to the contrasting modeling paradigms of discrete sequences. We introduce \textbf{FoldTokenizer} to represent protein sequence-structure as discrete symbols. This innovative approach involves projecting residue types and structures into a discrete space, guided by a reconstruction loss for information preservation. We refer to the learned discrete symbols as \textbf{FoldToken}, and the sequence of FoldTokens serves as a new protein language, transforming the protein sequence-structure into a unified modality. We apply the created protein language on general backbone inpainting and antibody design tasks, building the first GPT-style model (\textbf{FoldGPT}) for sequence-structure co-generation with promising results. Key to our success is the substantial enhancement of the vector quantization module, Soft Conditional Vector Quantization (\textbf{SoftCVQ}).