By studying the underlying policies of decision-making agents, we can learn about their shortcomings and potentially improve them. Traditionally, this has been done either by examining the agent's implementation, its behaviour while it is being executed, its performance with a reward/fitness function or by visualizing the density of states the agent visits. However, these methods fail to describe the policy's behaviour in complex, high-dimensional environments or do not scale to thousands of policies, which is required when studying training algorithms. We propose policy supervectors for characterizing agents by the distribution of states they visit, adopting successful techniques from the area of speech technology. Policy supervectors can characterize policies regardless of their design philosophy (e.g. rule-based vs. neural networks) and scale to thousands of policies on a single workstation machine. We demonstrate method's applicability by studying the evolution of policies during reinforcement learning, evolutionary training and imitation learning, providing insight on e.g. how the search space of evolutionary algorithms is also reflected in agent's behaviour, not just in the parameters.

Full truckload transportation (FTL) in the form of freight containers represents one of the most important transportation modes in international trade. Due to large volume and scale, in FTL, delivery time is often less critical but cost and service quality are crucial. Therefore, efficiently solving large scale multiple shift FTL problems is becoming more and more important and requires further research. In one of our earlier studies, a set covering model and a three-stage solution method were developed for a multi-shift FTL problem. This paper extends the previous work and presents a significantly more efficient approach by hybridising pricing and cutting strategies with metaheuristics (a variable neighbourhood search and a genetic algorithm). The metaheuristics were adopted to find promising columns (vehicle routes) guided by pricing and cuts are dynamically generated to eliminate infeasible flow assignments caused by incompatible commodities. Computational experiments on real-life and artificial benchmark FTL problems showed superior performance both in terms of computational time and solution quality, when compared with previous MIP based three-stage methods and two existing metaheuristics. The proposed cutting and heuristic pricing approach can efficiently solve large scale real-life FTL problems.

Malware detection has become a challenging task due to the increase in the number of malware families. Universal malware detection algorithms that can detect all the malware families are needed to make the whole process feasible. However, the more universal an algorithm is, the higher number of feature dimensions it needs to work with, and that inevitably causes the emerging problem of Curse of Dimensionality (CoD). Besides, it is also difficult to make this solution work due to the real-time behavior of malware analysis. In this paper, we address this problem and aim to propose a feature selection based malware detection algorithm using an evolutionary algorithm that is referred to as Artificial Bee Colony (ABC). The proposed algorithm enables researchers to decrease the feature dimension and as a result, boost the process of malware detection. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art.

DNA samples crime cases analysed in forensic genetics, frequently contain DNA from multiple contributors. These occur as convolutions of the DNA profiles of the individual contributors to the DNA sample. Thus, in cases where one or more of the contributors were unknown, an objective of interest would be the separation, often called deconvolution, of these unknown profiles. In order to obtain deconvolutions of the unknown DNA profiles, we introduced a multiple population evolutionary algorithm (MEA). We allowed the mutation operator of the MEA to utilise that the fitness is based on a probabilistic model and guide it by using the deviations between the observed and the expected value for every element of the encoded individual. This guided mutation operator (GM) was designed such that the larger the deviation the higher probability of mutation. Furthermore, the GM was inhomogeneous in time, decreasing to a specified lower bound as the number of iterations increased. We analysed 102 two-person DNA mixture samples in varying mixture proportions. The samples were quantified using two different DNA prep. kits: (1) Illumina ForenSeq Panel B (30 samples), and (2) Applied Biosystems Precision ID Globalfiler NGS STR panel (72 samples). The DNA mixtures were deconvoluted by the MEA and compared to the true DNA profiles of the sample. We analysed three scenarios where we assumed: (1) the DNA profile of the major contributor was unknown, (2) DNA profile of the minor was unknown, and (3) both DNA profiles were unknown. Furthermore, we conducted a series of sensitivity experiments on the ForenSeq panel by varying the sub-population size, comparing a completely random homogeneous mutation operator to the guided operator with varying mutation decay rates, and allowing for hill-climbing of the parent population.

In an effort to be the first organization to bring true artificial intelligence (AI) to the 401k market, The 401(k) Plan Company recently announced a minority investment in Unanimous AI to help elevate human decision-making in the workplace for HR partners, CFOs and plan participants. San Francisco-based Unanimous AI builds technologies that amplify human intelligence using technologies modeled on the biological principle of Swarm Intelligence. Unanimous AI in late October announced it has been awarded three new U.S. Patents covering its unique AI technology aimed at amplifying the intelligence of human groups. Swarm AI technology from Unanimous is a combination of real-time human input and AI algorithms, which the company says enables networked groups of people to think together as super-intelligent systems. Under terms of the deal, The 401(k) Plan Company will make Unanimous AI's capabilities available to employers seeking to evolve through the remote workforce considerations, empowering teams to make significantly better decisions. "AI has the power to replace humans, or to amplify their best work.

When the words "artificial intelligence" (AI) come to mind, your first thoughts may be of super-smart computers, or robots that perform tasks without needing any help from humans. Now, a multi-institutional team including researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has accomplished something not too far off: They developed an AI algorithm called CAMEO that discovered a potentially useful new material without requiring additional training from scientists. The AI system could help reduce the amount of trial-and-error time scientists spend in the lab, while maximizing productivity and efficiency in their research. The research team published their work on CAMEO in Nature Communications. In the field of materials science, scientists seek to discover new materials that can be used in specific applications, such as a "metal that's light but also strong for building a car, or one that can withstand high stresses and temperatures for a jet engine," said NIST researcher Aaron Gilad Kusne.

With this approach, candidate solutions to an optimization problem are randomly generated and act as individuals interacting with a larger population. A fitness function determines the quality of the solutions the candidates find as they move about in each iteration. The "best fit" individuals are then chosen for reproduction in the next iteration. This generational process is repeated until the algorithm has evolved to find the optimal solution to the problem.

A different class of inputs selection method is the genetic algorithm. This is a stochastic method based on the mechanics of natural genetics and biological evolution. The genetic algorithm implemented includes several methods to perform fitness assignment, selection, crossover, and mutation operators. The next figure shows a simplified flow diagram of the genetic algorithm. The genetic algorithm starts with a population of different subsets of variables.

Following decades of sustained improvement, metaheuristics are one of the great success stories of optimization research. However, in order for research in metaheuristics to avoid fragmentation and a lack of reproducibility, there is a pressing need for stronger scientific and computational infrastructure to support the development, analysis and comparison of new approaches. We argue that, via principled choice of infrastructure support, the field can pursue a higher level of scientific enquiry. We describe our vision and report on progress, showing how the adoption of common protocols for all metaheuristics can help liberate the potential of the field, easing the exploration of the design space of metaheuristics.

Finding good solutions for Multi-objective Optimization (MOPs) Problems is considered a hard problem, especially when considering MOPs with constraints. Thus, most of the works in the context of MOPs do not explore in-depth how different constraints affect the performance of MOP solvers. Here, we focus on exploring the effects of different Constraint Handling Techniques (CHTs) on MOEA/D, a commonly used MOP solver when solving complex real-world MOPs. Moreover, we introduce a simple and effective CHT focusing on the exploration of the decision space, the Three Stage Penalty. We explore each of these CHTs in MOEA/D on two simulated MOPs and six analytic MOPs (eight in total). The results of this work indicate that while the best CHT is problem-dependent, our new proposed Three Stage Penalty achieves competitive results and remarkable performance in terms of hypervolume values in the hard simulated car design MOP.