Lately, the energy communities have gained a lot of attention as they have the potential to significantly contribute to the resilience and flexibility of the energy system, facilitating widespread integration of intermittent renewable energy sources. Within these communities the prosumers can engage in peer-to-peer trading, fostering local collaborations and increasing awareness about energy usage and flexible consumption. However, even under these favorable conditions, prosumer engagement levels remain low, requiring trading mechanisms that are aligned with their social values and expectations. In this paper, we introduce an innovative hedonic game coordination and cooperation model for P2P energy trading among prosumers which considers the social relationships within an energy community to create energy coalitions and facilitate energy transactions among them. We defined a heuristic that optimizes the prosumers coalitions, considering their social and energy price preferences and balancing the energy demand and supply within the community. We integrated the proposed hedonic game model into a state-of-the-art blockchain-based P2P energy flexibility market and evaluated its performance within an energy community of prosumers. The evaluation results on a blockchain-based P2P energy flexibility market show the effectiveness in considering social factors when creating coalitions, increasing the total amount of energy transacted in a market session by 5% compared with other game theory-based solutions. Finally, it shows the importance of the social dimensions of P2P energy transactions, the positive social dynamics in the energy community increasing the amount of energy transacted by more than 10% while contributing to a more balanced energy demand and supply within the community.

Data-driven evolutionary algorithms usually aim to exploit the information behind a limited amount of data to perform optimization, which have proved to be successful in solving many complex real-world optimization problems. However, most data-driven evolutionary algorithms are centralized, causing privacy and security concerns. Existing federated Bayesian algorithms and data-driven evolutionary algorithms mainly protect the raw data on each client. To address this issue, this paper proposes a secure federated data-driven evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithm to protect both the raw data and the newly infilled solutions obtained by optimizing the acquisition function conducted on the server. We select the query points on a randomly selected client at each round of surrogate update by calculating the acquisition function values of the unobserved points on this client, thereby reducing the risk of leaking the information about the solution to be sampled. In addition, since the predicted objective values of each client may contain sensitive information, we mask the objective values with Diffie-Hellmann-based noise, and then send only the masked objective values of other clients to the selected client via the server. Since the calculation of the acquisition function also requires both the predicted objective value and the uncertainty of the prediction, the predicted mean objective and uncertainty are normalized to reduce the influence of noise. Experimental results on a set of widely used multi-objective optimization benchmarks show that the proposed algorithm can protect privacy and enhance security with only negligible sacrifice in the performance of federated data-driven evolutionary optimization.

Deep Learning (DL) is increasingly used in safety-critical applications, raising concerns about its reliability. DL suffers from a well-known problem of lacking robustness, especially when faced with adversarial perturbations known as Adversarial Examples (AEs). Despite recent efforts to detect AEs using advanced attack and testing methods, these approaches often overlook the input distribution and perceptual quality of the perturbations. As a result, the detected AEs may not be relevant in practical applications or may appear unrealistic to human observers. This can waste testing resources on rare AEs that seldom occur during real-world use, limiting improvements in DL model dependability. In this paper, we propose a new robustness testing approach for detecting AEs that considers both the feature level distribution and the pixel level distribution, capturing the perceptual quality of adversarial perturbations. The two considerations are encoded by a novel hierarchical mechanism. First, we select test seeds based on the density of feature level distribution and the vulnerability of adversarial robustness. The vulnerability of test seeds are indicated by the auxiliary information, that are highly correlated with local robustness. Given a test seed, we then develop a novel genetic algorithm based local test case generation method, in which two fitness functions work alternatively to control the perceptual quality of detected AEs. Finally, extensive experiments confirm that our holistic approach considering hierarchical distributions is superior to the state-of-the-arts that either disregard any input distribution or only consider a single (non-hierarchical) distribution, in terms of not only detecting imperceptible AEs but also improving the overall robustness of the DL model under testing.

Evolutionary algorithms (EA), a class of stochastic search methods based on the principles of natural evolution, have received widespread acclaim for their exceptional performance in various real-world optimization problems. While researchers worldwide have proposed a wide variety of EAs, certain limitations remain, such as slow convergence speed and poor generalization capabilities. Consequently, numerous scholars actively explore improvements to algorithmic structures, operators, search patterns, etc., to enhance their optimization performance. Reinforcement learning (RL) integrated as a component in the EA framework has demonstrated superior performance in recent years. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on integrating reinforcement learning into the evolutionary algorithm, referred to as reinforcement learning-assisted evolutionary algorithm (RL-EA). We begin with the conceptual outlines of reinforcement learning and the evolutionary algorithm. We then provide a taxonomy of RL-EA. Subsequently, we discuss the RL-EA integration method, the RL-assisted strategy adopted by RL-EA, and its applications according to the existing literature. The RL-assisted procedure is divided according to the implemented functions including solution generation, learnable objective function, algorithm/operator/sub-population selection, parameter adaptation, and other strategies. Finally, we analyze potential directions for future research. This survey serves as a rich resource for researchers interested in RL-EA as it overviews the current state-of-the-art and highlights the associated challenges. By leveraging this survey, readers can swiftly gain insights into RL-EA to develop efficient algorithms, thereby fostering further advancements in this emerging field.

Today's cloud data centers are often distributed geographically to provide robust data services. But these geo-distributed data centers (GDDCs) have a significant associated environmental impact due to their increasing carbon emissions and water usage, which needs to be curtailed. Moreover, the energy costs of operating these data centers continue to rise. This paper proposes a novel framework to co-optimize carbon emissions, water footprint, and energy costs of GDDCs, using a hybrid workload management framework called SHIELD that integrates machine learning guided local search with a decomposition-based evolutionary algorithm. Our framework considers geographical factors and time-based differences in power generation/use, costs, and environmental impacts to intelligently manage workload distribution across GDDCs and data center operation. Experimental results show that SHIELD can realize 34.4x speedup and 2.1x improvement in Pareto Hypervolume while reducing the carbon footprint by up to 3.7x, water footprint by up to 1.8x, energy costs by up to 1.3x, and a cumulative improvement across all objectives (carbon, water, cost) of up to 4.8x compared to the state-of-the-art.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid model combining genetic algorithm and hill climbing algorithm for optimizing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on the CIFAR-100 dataset. The proposed model utilizes a population of chromosomes that represent the hyperparameters of the CNN model. The genetic algorithm is used for selecting and breeding the fittest chromosomes to generate new offspring. The hill climbing algorithm is then applied to the offspring to further optimize their hyperparameters. The mutation operation is introduced to diversify the population and to prevent the algorithm from getting stuck in local optima. The Genetic Algorithm is used for global search and exploration of the search space, while Hill Climbing is used for local optimization of promising solutions. The objective function is the accuracy of the trained neural network on the CIFAR-100 test set. The performance of the hybrid model is evaluated by comparing it with the standard genetic algorithm and hill-climbing algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model achieves better accuracy with fewer generations compared to the standard algorithms. Therefore, the proposed hybrid model can be a promising approach for optimizing CNN models on large datasets.

Evolutionary search-based techniques are commonly used for testing autonomous robotic systems. However, these approaches often rely on computationally expensive simulator-based models for test scenario evaluation. To improve the computational efficiency of the search-based testing, we propose augmenting the evolutionary search (ES) with a reinforcement learning (RL) agent trained using surrogate rewards derived from domain knowledge. In our approach, known as RIGAA (Reinforcement learning Informed Genetic Algorithm for Autonomous systems testing), we first train an RL agent to learn useful constraints of the problem and then use it to produce a certain part of the initial population of the search algorithm. By incorporating an RL agent into the search process, we aim to guide the algorithm towards promising regions of the search space from the start, enabling more efficient exploration of the solution space. We evaluate RIGAA on two case studies: maze generation for an autonomous ant robot and road topology generation for an autonomous vehicle lane keeping assist system. In both case studies, RIGAA converges faster to fitter solutions and produces a better test suite (in terms of average test scenario fitness and diversity). RIGAA also outperforms the state-of-the-art tools for vehicle lane keeping assist system testing, such as AmbieGen and Frenetic.

In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of AI music generation tools, including both research projects and commercialized applications. To conduct our analysis, we classified music generation approaches into three categories: parameter-based, text-based, and visual-based classes. Our survey highlights the diverse possibilities and functional features of these tools, which cater to a wide range of users, from regular listeners to professional musicians. We observed that each tool has its own set of advantages and limitations. As a result, we have compiled a comprehensive list of these factors that should be considered during the tool selection process. Moreover, our survey offers critical insights into the underlying mechanisms and challenges of AI music generation.

The widespread adoption of DNNs in NLP software has highlighted the need for robustness. Researchers proposed various automatic testing techniques for adversarial test cases. However, existing methods suffer from two limitations: weak error-discovering capabilities, with success rates ranging from 0% to 24.6% for BERT-based NLP software, and time inefficiency, taking 177.8s to 205.28s per test case, making them challenging for time-constrained scenarios. To address these issues, this paper proposes LEAP, an automated test method that uses LEvy flight-based Adaptive Particle swarm optimization integrated with textual features to generate adversarial test cases. Specifically, we adopt Levy flight for population initialization to increase the diversity of generated test cases. We also design an inertial weight adaptive update operator to improve the efficiency of LEAP's global optimization of high-dimensional text examples and a mutation operator based on the greedy strategy to reduce the search time. We conducted a series of experiments to validate LEAP's ability to test NLP software and found that the average success rate of LEAP in generating adversarial test cases is 79.1%, which is 6.1% higher than the next best approach (PSOattack). While ensuring high success rates, LEAP significantly reduces time overhead by up to 147.6s compared to other heuristic-based methods. Additionally, the experimental results demonstrate that LEAP can generate more transferable test cases and significantly enhance the robustness of DNN-based systems.

This work presents the design, implementation and validation of learning techniques based on the kNN scheme for gesture detection in prosthetic control. To cope with high computational demands in instance-based prediction, methods of dataset reduction are evaluated considering real-time determinism to allow for the reliable integration into battery-powered portable devices. The influence of parameterization and varying proportionality schemes is analyzed, utilizing an eight-channel-sEMG armband. Besides offline cross-validation accuracy, success rates in real-time pilot experiments (online target achievement tests) are determined. Based on the assessment of specific dataset reduction techniques' adequacy for embedded control applications regarding accuracy and timing behaviour, Decision Surface Mapping (DSM) proves itself promising when applying kNN on the reduced set. A randomized, double-blind user study was conducted to evaluate the respective methods (kNN and kNN with DSM-reduction) against Ridge Regression (RR) and RR with Random Fourier Features (RR-RFF). The kNN-based methods performed significantly better (p<0.0005) than the regression techniques. Between DSM-kNN and kNN, there was no statistically significant difference (significance level 0.05). This is remarkable in consideration of only one sample per class in the reduced set, thus yielding a reduction rate of over 99% while preserving success rate. The same behaviour could be confirmed in an extended user study. With k=1, which turned out to be an excellent choice, the runtime complexity of both kNN (in every prediction step) as well as DSM-kNN (in the training phase) becomes linear concerning the number of original samples, favouring dependable wearable prosthesis applications.