Quantum Reinforcement Learning (QRL) offers potential advantages over classical Reinforcement Learning, such as compact state space representation and faster convergence in certain scenarios. However, practical benefits require further validation. QRL faces challenges like flat solution landscapes, where traditional gradient-based methods are inefficient, necessitating the use of gradient-free algorithms. This work explores the integration of metaheuristic algorithms -- Particle Swarm Optimization, Ant Colony Optimization, Tabu Search, Genetic Algorithm, Simulated Annealing, and Harmony Search -- into QRL. These algorithms provide flexibility and efficiency in parameter optimization. Evaluations in $5\times5$ MiniGrid Reinforcement Learning environments show that, all algorithms yield near-optimal results, with Simulated Annealing and Particle Swarm Optimization performing best. In the Cart Pole environment, Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms, and Particle Swarm Optimization achieve optimal results, while the others perform slightly better than random action selection. These findings demonstrate the potential of Particle Swarm Optimization and Simulated Annealing for efficient QRL learning, emphasizing the need for careful algorithm selection and adaptation.

Machine learning (ML) is revolutionising drug discovery by expediting the prediction of small molecule properties essential for developing new drugs. These properties -- including absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME)-- are crucial in the early stages of drug development since they provide an understanding of the course of the drug in the organism, i.e., the drug's pharmacokinetics. However, existing methods lack personalisation and rely on manually crafted ML algorithms or pipelines, which can introduce inefficiencies and biases into the process. To address these challenges, we propose a novel evolutionary-based automated ML method (AutoML) specifically designed for predicting small molecule properties, with a particular focus on pharmacokinetics. Leveraging the advantages of grammar-based genetic programming, our AutoML method streamlines the process by automatically selecting algorithms and designing predictive pipelines tailored to the particular characteristics of input molecular data. Results demonstrate AutoML's effectiveness in selecting diverse ML algorithms, resulting in comparable or even improved predictive performances compared to conventional approaches. By offering personalised ML-driven pipelines, our method promises to enhance small molecule research in drug discovery, providing researchers with a valuable tool for accelerating the development of novel therapeutic drugs.

Landscape analysis aims to characterise optimisation problems based on their objective (or fitness) function landscape properties. The problem search space is typically sampled, and various landscape features are estimated based on the samples. One particularly salient set of features is information content, which requires the samples to be sequences of neighbouring solutions, such that the local relationships between consecutive sample points are preserved. Generating such spatially correlated samples that also provide good search space coverage is challenging. It is therefore common to first obtain an unordered sample with good search space coverage, and then apply an ordering algorithm such as the nearest neighbour to minimise the distance between consecutive points in the sample. However, the nearest neighbour algorithm becomes computationally prohibitive in higher dimensions, thus there is a need for more efficient alternatives. In this study, Hilbert space-filling curves are proposed as a method to efficiently obtain high-quality ordered samples. Hilbert curves are a special case of fractal curves, and guarantee uniform coverage of a bounded search space while providing a spatially correlated sample. We study the effectiveness of Hilbert curves as samplers, and discover that they are capable of extracting salient features at a fraction of the computational cost compared to Latin hypercube sampling with post-factum ordering. Further, we investigate the use of Hilbert curves as an ordering strategy, and find that they order the sample significantly faster than the nearest neighbour ordering, without sacrificing the saliency of the extracted features.

Process models are, like event data, first-class citizens in most process mining approaches. Several process modeling formalisms have been proposed and used, e.g., Petri nets, BPMN, and process trees. Despite their frequent use, little research addresses the formal properties of process trees and the corresponding potential to improve the efficiency of solving common computational problems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an invertible state space definition for process trees and demonstrate that the corresponding state space graph is isomorphic to the state space graph of the tree's inverse. Our result supports the development of novel, time-efficient, decomposition strategies for applications of process trees. Our experiments confirm that our state space definition allows for the adoption of bidirectional state space search, which significantly improves the overall performance of state space searches.

Load data from power network clusters indicates economic development in each area, crucial for predicting regional trends and guiding power enterprise decisions. The Transformer model, a leading method for load prediction, faces challenges modeling historical data due to variables like weather, events, festivals, and data volatility. To tackle this, the cloud model's fuzzy feature is utilized to manage uncertainties effectively. Presenting an innovative approach, the Cloud Model Improved Transformer (CMIT) method integrates the Transformer model with the cloud model utilizing the particle swarm optimization algorithm, with the aim of achieving robust and precise power load predictions. Through comparative experiments conducted on 31 real datasets within a power network cluster, it is demonstrated that CMIT significantly surpasses the Transformer model in terms of prediction accuracy, thereby highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing forecasting capabilities within the power network cluster sector.

In recent years, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has found application in numerous areas of science and industry, such as autonomous driving, telecommunications, and global health. Nevertheless, MARL suffers from, for instance, an exponential growth of dimensions. Inherent properties of quantum mechanics help to overcome these limitations, e.g., by significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters. Previous studies have developed an approach that uses gradient-free quantum Reinforcement Learning and evolutionary optimization for variational quantum circuits (VQCs) to reduce the trainable parameters and avoid barren plateaus as well as vanishing gradients. This leads to a significantly better performance of VQCs compared to classical neural networks with a similar number of trainable parameters and a reduction in the number of parameters by more than 97 \% compared to similarly good neural networks. We extend an approach of K\"olle et al. by proposing a Gate-Based, a Layer-Based, and a Prototype-Based concept to mutate and recombine VQCs. Our results show the best performance for mutation-only strategies and the Gate-Based approach. In particular, we observe a significantly better score, higher total and own collected coins, as well as a superior own coin rate for the best agent when evaluated in the Coin Game environment.

Deep AndersoNN accelerates AI by exploiting High-performance computing (HPC) is becoming essential the continuum limit as the number of explicit layers to artificial intelligence (AI) in the modern paradigm of in a neural network approaches infinity and machine learning (Schwarz, Nicholas et al, 2020). Foundation can be taken as a single implicit layer, known as models, large language models (LLMs), and multiagent a deep equilibrium model. Solving for deep equilibrium natural language societies of mind (NLSOMs) (Zhuge, model parameters reduces to a nonlinear Mingchen et al., 2023) require significant computing resources fixed point iteration problem, enabling the use of and large amounts of data to achieve practical accuracies vector-to-vector iterative solvers and windowing with up to trillions of parameters using explicit neural techniques, such as Anderson extrapolation, for networks (Andrae, Anders S.G. and Edler, Tomas, 2015; accelerating convergence to the fixed point deep de Vries, Alex, 2023; Patterson, David et al., 2021; Jones, equilibrium. Here we show that Deep AndersoNN Nicola et al., 2018). As the number of layers in a neural network achieves up to an order of magnitude of speed-up approaches infinity, these models can be approximated in training and inference. The method is demonstrated with single-layer implicit models, known as deep equilibrium on density functional theory results for industrial (DEQ) models (Bai, 2022; Bai, Shaojie and Kolter, J applications by constructing artificial life Zico and Koltun, Vladlen, 2019; Bai, Shaojie and Koltun, and materials'scientists' capable of classifying Vladlen and Kolter, J Zico; 2021; Huang et al., 2021; Geng, drugs as strongly or weakly polar, metal-organic Zhengyang and Zhang, Xin-Yu and Bai, Shaojie and Wang, frameworks by pore size, and crystalline materials Yisen and Lin, Zhouchen, 2021). Solving for the parameters as metals, semiconductors, and insulators, of a single implicit layer that takes both the input, x, and using graph images of node-neighbor representations the output, y, as inputs are reduced to a fixed point iteration transformed from atom-bond networks.

Information-theoretic fitness functions are becoming increasingly popular to produce generally useful, task-independent behaviors. One such universal function, dubbed empowerment, measures the amount of control an agent exerts on its environment via its sensorimotor system. Specifically, empowerment attempts to maximize the mutual information between an agent's actions and its received sensor states at a later point in time. Traditionally, empowerment has been applied to a conventional sensorimotor apparatus, such as a robot. Here, we expand the approach to a distributed, multi-agent sensorimotor system embodied by a neural cellular automaton (NCA). We show that the addition of empowerment as a secondary objective in the evolution of NCA to perform the task of morphogenesis, growing and maintaining a pre-specified shape, results in higher fitness compared to evolving for morphogenesis alone. Results suggest there may be a synergistic relationship between morphogenesis and empowerment. That is, indirectly selecting for coordination between neighboring cells over the duration of development is beneficial to the developmental process itself. Such a finding may have applications in developmental biology by providing potential mechanisms of communication between cells during growth from a single cell to a multicellular, target morphology. Source code for the experiments in this paper can be found at: \url{https://github.com/caitlingrasso/empowered-nca}.

This paper addresses early wildfire management using a team of UAVs for the mitigation of fires. The early detection and mitigation systems help in alleviating the destruction with reduced resource utilization. A Genetic Algorithm-based Routing and Scheduling with Time constraints (GARST) is proposed to find the shortest schedule route to mitigate the fires as Single UAV Tasks (SUT). The objective of GARST is to compute the route and schedule of the UAVs so that the UAVS reach the assigned fire locations before the fire becomes a Multi UAV Task (MUT) and completely quench the fire using the extinguisher. The fitness function used for the genetic algorithm is the total quench time for mitigation of total fires. The selection, crossover, mutation operators, and elitist strategies collectively ensure the exploration and exploitation of the solution space, maintaining genetic diversity, preventing premature convergence, and preserving high-performing individuals for the effective optimization of solutions. The GARST effectively addresses the challenges posed by the NP-complete problem of routing and scheduling for growing tasks with time constraints. The GARST is able to handle infeasible scenarios effectively, contributing to the overall optimization of the wildfire management system.

Assessing the robustness of multimodal models against adversarial examples is an important aspect for the safety of its users. We craft L0-norm perturbation attacks on the preprocessed input images. We launch them in a black-box setup against four multimodal models and two unimodal DNNs, considering both targeted and untargeted misclassification. Our attacks target less than 0.04% of perturbed image area and integrate different spatial positioning of perturbed pixels: sparse positioning and pixels arranged in different contiguous shapes (row, column, diagonal, and patch). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to assess the robustness of three state-of-the-art multimodal models (ALIGN, AltCLIP, GroupViT) against different sparse and contiguous pixel distribution perturbations. The obtained results indicate that unimodal DNNs are more robust than multimodal models. Furthermore, models using CNN-based Image Encoder are more vulnerable than models with ViT - for untargeted attacks, we obtain a 99% success rate by perturbing less than 0.02% of the image area.