Evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) algorithms have been demonstrated to be effective in solving multi-criteria decision-making problems. In real-world applications, analysts often employ several algorithms concurrently and compare their solution sets to gain insight into the characteristics of different algorithms and explore a broader range of feasible solutions. However, EMO algorithms are typically treated as black boxes, leading to difficulties in performing detailed analysis and comparisons between the internal evolutionary processes. Inspired by the successful application of visual analytics tools in explainable AI, we argue that interactive visualization can significantly enhance the comparative analysis between multiple EMO algorithms. In this paper, we present a visual analytics framework that enables the exploration and comparison of evolutionary processes in EMO algorithms. Guided by a literature review and expert interviews, the proposed framework addresses various analytical tasks and establishes a multi-faceted visualization design to support the comparative analysis of intermediate generations in the evolution as well as solution sets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through case studies on benchmarking and real-world multi-objective optimization problems to elucidate how analysts can leverage our framework to inspect and compare diverse algorithms.

Script identification and text recognition are some of the major domains in the application of Artificial Intelligence. In this era of digitalization, the use of digital note-taking has become a common practice. Still, conventional methods of using pen and paper is a prominent way of writing. This leads to the classification of scripts based on the method they are obtained. A survey on the current methodologies and state-of-art methods used for processing and identification would prove beneficial for researchers. The aim of this article is to discuss the advancement in the techniques for script pre-processing and text recognition. In India there are twelve prominent Indic scripts, unlike the English language, these scripts have layers of characteristics. Complex characteristics such as similarity in text shape make them difficult to recognize and analyze, thus this requires advance preprocessing methods for their accurate recognition. A sincere attempt is made in this survey to provide a comparison between all algorithms. We hope that this survey would provide insight to a researcher working not only on Indic scripts but also other languages.

Differential equation discovery, a machine learning subfield, is used to develop interpretable models, particularly in nature-related applications. By expertly incorporating the general parametric form of the equation of motion and appropriate differential terms, algorithms can autonomously uncover equations from data. This paper explores the prerequisites and tools for independent equation discovery without expert input, eliminating the need for equation form assumptions. We focus on addressing the challenge of assessing the adequacy of discovered equations when the correct equation is unknown, with the aim of providing insights for reliable equation discovery without prior knowledge of the equation form.

This research project investigates Lenia, an artificial life platform that simulates ecosystems of digital creatures. Lenia's ecosystem consists of simple, artificial organisms that can move, consume, grow, and reproduce. The platform is important as a tool for studying artificial life and evolution, as it provides a scalable and flexible environment for creating a diverse range of organisms with varying abilities and behaviors. Measuring complexity in Lenia is a key aspect of the study, which identifies the metrics for measuring long-term complex emerging behavior of rules, with the aim of evolving better Lenia behaviors which are yet not discovered. The Genetic Algorithm uses neighborhoods or kernels as genotype while keeping the rest of the parameters of Lenia as fixed, for example growth function, to produce different behaviors respective to the population and then measures fitness value to decide the complexity of the resulting behavior. First, we use Variation over Time as a fitness function where higher variance between the frames are rewarded. Second, we use Auto-encoder based fitness where variation of the list of reconstruction loss for the frames is rewarded. Third, we perform combined fitness where higher variation of the pixel density of reconstructed frames is rewarded. All three experiments are tweaked with pixel alive threshold and frames used. Finally, after performing nine experiments of each fitness for 500 generations, we pick configurations from all experiments such that there is a scope of further evolution, and run it for 2500 generations. Results show that the kernel's center of mass increases with a specific set of pixels and together with borders the kernel try to achieve a Gaussian distribution. Results are available at https://s4nyam.github.io/evolenia/

In this research, we investigate the possibility of applying a search strategy to genetic algorithms to explore the entire genetic tree structure. Several methods aid in performing tree searches; however, simpler algorithms such as breadth-first, depth-first, and iterative techniques are computation-heavy and often result in a long execution time. Adversarial techniques are often the preferred mechanism when performing a probabilistic search, yielding optimal results more quickly. The problem we are trying to tackle in this paper is the optimization of neural networks using genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms (GA) form a tree of possible states and provide a mechanism for rewards via the fitness function. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has proven to be an effective tree search strategy given states and rewards; therefore, we will combine these approaches to optimally search for the best result generated with genetic algorithms.

For example, a grid-based search is a classical approach for spacecraft preliminary trajectory design. However, this technique is more suitable for impulsive trajectory since the search space is much smaller. Due to the curse of dimensionality, low-thrust trajectory design often needs a more intelligent global search algorithm. Evolutionary algorithms, including Differential Evolution (DE) [4], Genetic algorithm (GA) [5], Particle swarm optimization (PSO) [6], etc., have been widely used in global optimization problems in spacecraft trajectory design [7, 8, 9, 10]. These algorithms iteratively generate new solutions by introducing randomness to previously obtained solutions and downselecting the solutions based on specific quality metrics. In addition, researchers also combine stochastic search algorithms with local gradient-based optimizers to attempt to find the globally optimal solution. The multistart method samples the search space with a fixed distribution and feeds the samples into a local optimizer as starting points for local search [10]. Inspired by energy minimization principles in computational chemistry, Monotonic Basin Hopping (MBH) [11, 12] adds random perturbations during the local search to uncover multiple local optima solutions that are close to each other. MBH rapidly became popular in the sphere of spacecraft trajectory design [1, 13, 14] and has been established as the state-of-the-art algorithm in terms of efficiency and solution quality through various benchmarks [15, 9, 10].

QDax is an open-source library with a streamlined and modular API for Quality-Diversity (QD) optimization algorithms in Jax. The library serves as a versatile tool for optimization purposes, ranging from black-box optimization to continuous control. QDax offers implementations of popular QD, Neuroevolution, and Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, supported by various examples. All the implementations can be just-in-time compiled with Jax, facilitating efficient execution across multiple accelerators, including GPUs and TPUs. These implementations effectively demonstrate the framework's flexibility and user-friendliness, easing experimentation for research purposes. Furthermore, the library is thoroughly documented and tested with 95\% coverage.

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are increasingly being using in applications such as computer games [De Souza, 2014, Hastings et al., 2009] and robotics [Hoffmann, 2001, Fleming and Purshouse, 2002] to learn control algorithms (policies), as well as being applied to classic control tasks such as the benchmark suites available in OpenAi Gym [Brockman et al., 2016]. Often direct policy search algorithms such as EAs require a large number of evaluations: when these evaluations are costly in terms of time, this can result in extremely long learning times, which can be prohibitive in the worst case. Unfortunately many applications of interest suffer from this problem. For example, the protein folding problem [Dill et al., 2008] requires costly simulations, while applications that involve a double optimization process are also considered very computationally costly. This includes for example the joint optimization of robot morphology and control [Hart and Le Goff, 2022, Le Goff et al., 2021] in simulation (which typically use an outer loop to evolve body-plans and a nested inner-loop to evolve control), nested combinatorial optimization problems[Wu et al., 2021, Kobeaga et al., 2021] or hyperparameter optimization [De Souza et al., 2022]. Specifically in robotics, evaluations that need to be conducted directly on a physical robot to avoid any reality-gap tend to be very time-consuming, while repeating lengthy evaluations also places considerable wear and tear on machinery, potentially leading to unreliable objective-function values.

In this letter, we propose a model parameter identification method via a hyperparameter optimization scheme (MI-HPO). Our method adopts an efficient explore-exploit strategy to identify the parameters of dynamic models in a data-driven optimization manner. We utilize our method for model parameter identification of the AV-21, a full-scaled autonomous race vehicle. We then incorporate the optimized parameters for the design of model-based planning and control systems of our platform. In experiments, MI-HPO exhibits more than 13 times faster convergence than traditional parameter identification methods. Furthermore, the parametric models learned via MI-HPO demonstrate good fitness to the given datasets and show generalization ability in unseen dynamic scenarios. We further conduct extensive field tests to validate our model-based system, demonstrating stable obstacle avoidance and high-speed driving up to 217 km/h at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The source code for our work and videos of the tests are available at https://github.com/hynkis/MI-HPO.

Numerical methods for Inverse Kinematics (IK) employ iterative, linear approximations of the IK until the end-effector is brought from its initial pose to the desired final pose. These methods require the computation of the Jacobian of the Forward Kinematics (FK) and its inverse in the linear approximation of the IK. Despite all the successful implementations reported in the literature, Jacobian-based IK methods can still fail to preserve certain useful properties if an improper matrix inverse, e.g. Moore-Penrose (MP), is employed for incommensurate robotic systems. In this paper, we propose a systematic, robust and accurate numerical solution for the IK problem using the Mixed (MX) Generalized Inverse (GI) applied to any type of Jacobians (e.g., analytical, numerical or geometric) derived for any commensurate and incommensurate robot. This approach is robust to whether the system is under-determined (less than 6 DoF) or over-determined (more than 6 DoF). We investigate six robotics manipulators with various Degrees of Freedom (DoF) to demonstrate that commonly used GI's fail to guarantee the same system behaviors when the units are varied for incommensurate robotics manipulators. In addition, we evaluate the proposed methodology as a global IK solver and compare against well-known IK methods for redundant manipulators. Based on the experimental results, we conclude that the right choice of GI is crucial in preserving certain properties of the system (i.e. unit-consistency).