Many machine learning strategies designed to automate mathematical tasks leverage neural networks to search large combinatorial spaces of mathematical symbols. In contrast to traditional evolutionary approaches, using a neural network at the core of the search allows learning higher-level symbolic patterns, providing an informed direction to guide the search. When no labeled data is available, such networks can still be trained using reinforcement learning. However, we demonstrate that this approach can suffer from an early commitment phenomenon and from initialization bias, both of which limit exploration. We present two exploration methods to tackle these issues, building upon ideas of entropy regularization and distribution initialization. We show that these techniques can improve the performance, increase sample efficiency, and lower the complexity of solutions for the task of symbolic regression.

AI in finance broadly refers to the applications of AI techniques in financial businesses. This area has been lasting for decades with both classic and modern AI techniques applied to increasingly broader areas of finance, economy and society. In contrast to either discussing the problems, aspects and opportunities of finance that have benefited from specific AI techniques and in particular some new-generation AI and data science (AIDS) areas or reviewing the progress of applying specific techniques to resolving certain financial problems, this review offers a comprehensive and dense roadmap of the overwhelming challenges, techniques and opportunities of AI research in finance over the past decades. The landscapes and challenges of financial businesses and data are firstly outlined, followed by a comprehensive categorization and a dense overview of the decades of AI research in finance. We then structure and illustrate the data-driven analytics and learning of financial businesses and data. The comparison, criticism and discussion of classic vs. modern AI techniques for finance are followed. Lastly, open issues and opportunities address future AI-empowered finance and finance-motivated AI research.

The most common/commercial application of AI is to gain insights or make predictions on a dataset. Even though I think that this is interesting, these techniques have been widely covered by others. This article covers a more experimental application of machine learning: this is allowing machine learning to manipulate a physics simulation. There is a lot of different possibilities of putting an AI into a physics environment, but all of them involve manipulating and controlling objects and forces in the environment. To get good results from this project, we need to add limitations to the AI's control in the environment.

When controllers (brains) and morphologies (bodies) of robots simultaneously evolve, this can lead to a problem, namely the brain & body mismatch problem. In this research, we propose a solution of lifetime learning. We set up a system where modular robots can create offspring that inherit the bodies of parents by recombination and mutation. With regards to the brains of the offspring, we use two methods to create them. The first one entails solely evolution which means the brain of a robot child is inherited from its parents. The second approach is evolution plus learning which means the brain of a child is inherited as well, but additionally is developed by a learning algorithm - RevDEknn. We compare these two methods by running experiments in a simulator called Revolve and use efficiency, efficacy, and the morphology intelligence of the robots for the comparison. The experiments show that the evolution plus learning method does not only lead to a higher fitness level, but also to more morphologically evolving robots. This constitutes a quantitative demonstration that changes in the brain can induce changes in the body, leading to the concept of morphological intelligence, which is quantified by the learning delta, meaning the ability of a morphology to facilitate learning.

Tiny drones are ideal candidates for fully autonomous jobs that are too dangerous or time-consuming for humans. A commonly shared dream by engineers and fire & rescue services, would be to have swarms of such drones help in search-and-rescue scenarios [1], for instance to localize gas leaks without endangering human lives. Tiny drones are ideal for such tasks, since they are small enough to navigate in narrow spaces, safe, agile, and very inexpensive. However, their small footprint also makes the design of an autonomous swarm extremely challenging, both from a software and hardware perspective. From a software perspective, it is really challenging to come up with an algorithm capable of autonomous and collaborative navigation within such tight resource constraints.

Death has long been overlooked in evolutionary algorithms. Recent research has shown that death (when applied properly) can benefit the overall fitness of a population and can outperform sub-sections of a population that are "immortal" when allowed to evolve together in an environment [1]. In this paper, we strive to experimentally determine whether death is an adapted trait and whether this adaptation can be used to enhance our implementations of conventional genetic algorithms. Using some of the most widely accepted evolutionary death and aging theories, we observed that senescent death (in various forms) can lower the total run-time of genetic algorithms, increase the optimality of a solution, and decrease the variance in an algorithm's performance. We believe that death-enhanced genetic algorithms can accomplish this through their unique ability to backtrack out of and/or avoid getting trapped in local optima altogether.

The current dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation involves two separate stages: manipulator design and control. Because the robot's morphology and how it can be controlled are intimately linked, joint optimization of design and control can significantly improve performance. Existing methods for co-optimization are limited and fail to explore a rich space of designs. The primary reason is the trade-off between the complexity of designs that is necessary for contact-rich tasks against the practical constraints of manufacturing, optimization, contact handling, etc. We overcome several of these challenges by building an end-to-end differentiable framework for contact-aware robot design. The two key components of this framework are: a novel deformation-based parameterization that allows for the design of articulated rigid robots with arbitrary, complex geometry, and a differentiable rigid body simulator that can handle contact-rich scenarios and computes analytical gradients for a full spectrum of kinematic and dynamic parameters. On multiple manipulation tasks, our framework outperforms existing methods that either only optimize for control or for design using alternate representations or co-optimize using gradient-free methods.

Most machine learning algorithms are configured by one or several hyperparameters that must be carefully chosen and often considerably impact performance. To avoid a time consuming and unreproducible manual trial-and-error process to find well-performing hyperparameter configurations, various automatic hyperparameter optimization (HPO) methods, e.g., based on resampling error estimation for supervised machine learning, can be employed. After introducing HPO from a general perspective, this paper reviews important HPO methods such as grid or random search, evolutionary algorithms, Bayesian optimization, Hyperband and racing. It gives practical recommendations regarding important choices to be made when conducting HPO, including the HPO algorithms themselves, performance evaluation, how to combine HPO with ML pipelines, runtime improvements, and parallelization.

Most evolutionary robotics studies focus on evolving some targeted behavior without taking the energy usage into account. This limits the practical value of such systems because energy efficiency is an important property for real-world autonomous robots. In this paper, we mitigate this problem by extending our simulator with a battery model and taking energy consumption into account during fitness evaluations. Using this system we investigate how energy awareness affects the evolution of robots. Since our system is to evolve morphologies as well as controllers, the main research question is twofold: (i) what is the impact on the morphologies of the evolved robots, and (ii) what is the impact on the behavior of the evolved robots if energy consumption is included in the fitness evaluation? The results show that including the energy consumption in the fitness in a multi-objective fashion (by NSGA-II) reduces the average size of robot bodies while at the same time reducing their speed. However, robots generated without size reduction can achieve speeds comparable to robots from the baseline set.

Machine learning algorithms often produce models considered as complex black-box models by both end users and developers. They fail to explain the model in terms of the domain they are designed for. The proposed Iterative Visual Logical Classifier (IVLC) is an interpretable machine learning algorithm that allows end users to design a model and classify data with more confidence and without having to compromise on the accuracy. Such technique is especially helpful when dealing with sensitive and crucial data like cancer data in the medical domain with high cost of errors. With the help of the proposed interactive and lossless multidimensional visualization, end users can identify the pattern in the data based on which they can make explainable decisions. Such options would not be possible in black box machine learning methodologies. The interpretable IVLC algorithm is supported by the Interactive Shifted Paired Coordinates Software System (SPCVis). It is a lossless multidimensional data visualization system with user interactive features. The interactive approach provides flexibility to the end user to perform data classification as self-service without having to rely on a machine learning expert. Interactive pattern discovery becomes challenging while dealing with large data sets with hundreds of dimensions/features. To overcome this problem, this chapter proposes an automated classification approach combined with new Coordinate Order Optimizer (COO) algorithm and a Genetic algorithm. The COO algorithm automatically generates the coordinate pair sequences that best represent the data separation and the genetic algorithm helps optimizing the proposed IVLC algorithm by automatically generating the areas for data classification. The feasibility of the approach is shown by experiments on benchmark datasets covering both interactive and automated processes used for data classification.