Evolution gave rise to human and animal intelligence here on Earth. We argue that the path to developing artificial human-like-intelligence will pass through mimicking the evolutionary process in a nature-like simulation. In Nature, there are two processes driving the development of the brain: evolution and learning. Evolution acts slowly, across generations, and amongst other things, it defines what agents learn by changing their internal reward function. Learning acts fast, across one's lifetime, and it quickly updates agents' policy to maximise pleasure and minimise pain. The reward function is slowly aligned with the fitness function by evolution, however, as agents evolve the environment and its fitness function also change, increasing the misalignment between reward and fitness. It is extremely computationally expensive to replicate these two processes in simulation. This work proposes Evolution via Evolutionary Reward (EvER) that allows learning to single-handedly drive the search for policies with increasingly evolutionary fitness by ensuring the alignment of the reward function with the fitness function. In this search, EvER makes use of the whole state-action trajectories that agents go through their lifetime. In contrast, current evolutionary algorithms discard this information and consequently limit their potential efficiency at tackling sequential decision problems. We test our algorithm in two simple bio-inspired environments and show its superiority at generating more capable agents at surviving and reproducing their genes when compared with a state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithm.

The Fighting Game AI Competition (FTGAIC) provides a challenging benchmark for 2-player video game AI. The challenge arises from the large action space, diverse styles of characters and abilities, and the real-time nature of the game. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that combines Rolling Horizon Evolution Algorithm (RHEA) with opponent model learning. The approach is readily applicable to any 2-player video game. In contrast to conventional RHEA, an opponent model is proposed and is optimized by supervised learning with cross-entropy and reinforcement learning with policy gradient and Q-learning respectively, based on history observations from opponent. The model is learned during the live gameplay. With the learned opponent model, the extended RHEA is able to make more realistic plans based on what the opponent is likely to do. This tends to lead to better results. We compared our approach directly with the bots from the FTGAIC 2018 competition, and found our method to significantly outperform all of them, for all three character. Furthermore, our proposed bot with the policy-gradient-based opponent model is the only one without using Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) among top five bots in the 2019 competition in which it achieved second place, while using much less domain knowledge than the winner.

This two-part review examines how automation has contributed to different aspects of discovery in the chemical sciences. In this first part, we describe a classification for discoveries of physical matter (molecules, materials, devices), processes, and models and how they are unified as search problems. We then introduce a set of questions and considerations relevant to assessing the extent of autonomy. Finally, we describe many case studies of discoveries accelerated by or resulting from computer assistance and automation from the domains of synthetic chemistry, drug discovery, inorganic chemistry, and materials science. These illustrate how rapid advancements in hardware automation and machine learning continue to transform the nature of experimentation and modelling. Part two reflects on these case studies and identifies a set of open challenges for the field.

Nearly all model algorithms used in machine learning use two different sets of parameters: the training parameters and the meta-parameters (hyperparameters). While the training parameters are learned during the training phase, the values of the hyperparameters have to be specified before learning starts. For a given dataset, we would like to find the optimal combination of hyperparameter values, in a reasonable amount of time. This is a challenging task because of its computational complexity. In previous work [11], we introduced the Weighted Random Search (WRS) method, a combination of Random Search (RS) and probabilistic greedy heuristic. In the current paper, we compare the WRS method with several state-of-the art hyperparameter optimization methods with respect to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) hyperparameter optimization. The criterion is the classification accuracy achieved within the same number of tested combinations of hyperparameter values. According to our experiments, the WRS algorithm outperforms the other methods.

A novel bioinspired metaheuristic is proposed in this work, simulating how the Coronavirus spreads and infects healthy people. From an initial individual (the patient zero), the coronavirus infects new patients at known rates, creating new populations of infected people. Every individual can either die or infect and, afterwards, be sent to the recovered population. Relevant terms such as re-infection probability, super-spreading rate or traveling rate are introduced in the model in order to simulate as accurately as possible the coronavirus activity. The Coronavirus Optimization Algorithm has two major advantages compared to other similar strategies. First, the input parameters are already set according to the disease statistics, preventing researchers from initializing them with arbitrary values. Second, the approach has the ability of ending after several iterations, without setting this value either. Infected population initially grows at an exponential rate but after some iterations, the high number recovered and dead people starts decreasing the number of infected people in new iterations. As application case, it has been used to train a deep learning model for electricity load forecasting, showing quite remarkable results after few iterations.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are popular tools for generative modeling. The dynamics of their adversarial learning give rise to convergence pathologies during training such as mode and discriminator collapse. In machine learning, ensembles of predictors demonstrate better results than a single predictor for many tasks. In this study, we apply two evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to create ensembles to re-purpose generative models, i.e., given a set of heterogeneous generators that were optimized for one objective (e.g., minimize Frechet Inception Distance), create ensembles of them for optimizing a different objective (e.g., maximize the diversity of the generated samples). The first method is restricted by the exact size of the ensemble and the second method only restricts the upper bound of the ensemble size. Experimental analysis on the MNIST image benchmark demonstrates that both EA ensembles creation methods can re-purpose the models, without reducing their original functionality. The EA-based demonstrate significantly better performance compared to other heuristic-based methods. When comparing both evolutionary, the one with only an upper size bound on the ensemble size is the best.

A paper published by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, San Francisco research firm OpenAI, Facebook AI Research, the University of California at Berkeley, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University describes a paradigm that scales up multi-agent reinforcement learning, where AI models learn by having agents interact within an environment such that the agent population increases in size over time. By maintaining sets of agents in each training stage and performing mix-and-match and fine-tuning steps over these sets, the coauthors say the paradigm -- Evolutionary Population Curriculum -- is able to promote agents with the best adaptability to the next stage. In computer science, evolutionary computation is the family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution. Instead of following explicit mathematical gradients, these models generate variants, test them, and retain the top performers. They've shown promise in early work by OpenAI, Google, Uber, and others, but they're somewhat tough to prototype because there's a dearth of tools targeting evolutionary algorithms and natural evolution strategies (NES).

Multi-label classification consists in classifying an instance into two or more classes simultaneously. It is a very challenging task present in many real-world applications, such as classification of biology, image, video, audio, and text. Recently, the interest in interpretable classification models has grown, partially as a consequence of regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation. In this context, we propose a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm that generates multiple rule-based multi-label classification models, allowing users to choose among models that offer different compromises between predictive power and interpretability. An important contribution of this work is that different from most algorithms, which usually generate models based on lists (ordered collections) of rules, our algorithm generates models based on sets (unordered collections) of rules, increasing interpretability. Also, by employing a conflict avoidance algorithm during the rule-creation, every rule within a given model is guaranteed to be consistent with every other rule in the same model. Thus, no conflict resolution strategy is required, evolving simpler models. We conducted experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets and compared our results with state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of predictive performance (F-Score) and interpretability (model size), and demonstrate that our best models had comparable F-Score and smaller model sizes.

Discovering an optimal route to the most feasible parking lot has been a matter of concern for any driver which aggravates further during peak hours of the day and at congested places leading to considerable wastage of time and fuel. This paper proposes a Bayesian hierarchical technique for obtaining the most optimal route to a parking lot. The route selection is based on conflicting objectives and hence the problem belongs to the domain of multi-objective optimization. A probabilistic data driven method has been used to overcome the inherent problem of weight selection in the popular weighted sum technique. The weights of these conflicting objectives have been refined using a Bayesian hierarchical model based on Multinomial and Dirichlet prior. Genetic algorithm has been used to obtain optimal solutions. Simulated data has been used to obtain routes which are in close agreement with real life situations.

Game-playing Evolutionary Algorithms, specifically Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms, have recently managed to beat the state of the art in performance across many games. However, the best results per game are highly dependent on the specific configuration of modifications and hybrids introduced over several works, each described as parameters in the algorithm. However, the search for the best parameters has been reduced to several human-picked combinations, as the possibility space has grown beyond exhaustive search. This paper presents the state of the art in Rolling Horizon Evolutionary algorithms, combining all modifications described in literature and some additional ones for a large resultant hybrid. It then uses a parameter optimiser, the N-Tuple Bandit Evolutionary Algorithm, to find the best combination of parameters in 20 games with various properties from the General Video Game AI Framework. We highlight the noisy optimisation problem resultant, as both the games and the algorithm being optimised are stochastic. We then analyse the algorithm's parameters and interesting combinations revealed through the parameter optimisation process. Lastly, we show that it is possible to automatically explore a large parameter space and find configurations which outperform the state of the art on several games.