Explainable AI (XAI) methods help identify which image regions influence a model's prediction, but often face a trade-off between detail and interpretability. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) offers a model-aware alternative. However, LRP implementations commonly rely on heuristic rule sets that are not optimized for clarity or alignment with model behavior. We introduce EVO-LRP, a method that applies Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) to tune LRP hyperparameters based on quantitative interpretability metrics, such as faithfulness or sparseness. EVO-LRP outperforms traditional XAI approaches in both interpretability metric performance and visual coherence, with strong sensitivity to class-specific features. These findings demonstrate that attribution quality can be systematically improved through principled, task-specific optimization.

In certain real-world optimization scenarios, practitioners are not interested in solving multiple problems but rather in finding the best solution to a single, specific problem. When the computational budget is large relative to the cost of evaluating a candidate solution, multiple heuristic alternatives can be tried to solve the same given problem, each possibly with a different algorithm, parameter configuration, initialization, or stopping criterion. The sequential selection of which alternative to try next is crucial for efficiently identifying the one that provides the best possible solution across multiple attempts. Despite the relevance of this problem in practice, it has not yet been the exclusive focus of any existing review. Several sequential alternative selection strategies have been proposed in different research topics, but they have not been comprehensively and systematically unified under a common perspective. This work presents a focused review of single-problem multi-attempt heuristic optimization. It brings together suitable strategies to this problem that have been studied separately through algorithm selection, parameter tuning, multi-start and resource allocation. These strategies are explained using a unified terminology within a common framework, which supports the development of a taxonomy for systematically organizing and classifying them.

Humanoid robots have seen significant advancements in both design and control, with a growing emphasis on integrating these aspects to enhance overall performance. Traditionally, robot design has followed a sequential process, where control algorithms are developed after the hardware is finalized. However, this can be myopic and prevent robots to fully exploit their hardware capabilities. Recent approaches advocate for co-design, optimizing both design and control in parallel to maximize robotic capabilities. This paper presents the Evolutionary Continuous Adaptive RL-based Co-Design (EA-CoRL) framework, which combines reinforcement learning (RL) with evolutionary strategies to enable continuous adaptation of the control policy to the hardware. EA-CoRL comprises two key components: Design Evolution, which explores the hardware choices using an evolutionary algorithm to identify efficient configurations, and Policy Continuous Adaptation, which fine-tunes a task-specific control policy across evolving designs to maximize performance rewards. We evaluate EA-CoRL by co-designing the actuators (gear ratios) and control policy of the RH5 humanoid for a highly dynamic chin-up task, previously unfeasible due to actuator limitations. Comparative results against state-of-the-art RL-based co-design methods show that EA-CoRL achieves higher fitness score and broader design space exploration, highlighting the critical role of continuous policy adaptation in robot co-design.

Black-box optimization (BBO) addresses problems where objectives are accessible only through costly queries without gradients or explicit structure. Classical derivative-free methods -- line search, direct search, and model-based solvers such as Bayesian optimization -- form the backbone of BBO, yet often struggle in high-dimensional, noisy, or mixed-integer settings. Recent advances use machine learning (ML) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance BBO: ML provides expressive surrogates, adaptive updates, meta-learning portfolios, and generative models, while RL enables dynamic operator configuration, robustness, and meta-optimization across tasks. This paper surveys these developments, covering representative algorithms such as NNs with the modular model-based optimization framework (mlrMBO), zeroth-order adaptive momentum methods (ZO-AdaMM), automated BBO (ABBO), distributed block-wise optimization (DiBB), partition-based Bayesian optimization (SPBOpt), the transformer-based optimizer (B2Opt), diffusion-model-based BBO, surrogate-assisted RL for differential evolution (Surr-RLDE), robust BBO (RBO), coordinate-ascent model-based optimization with relative entropy (CAS-MORE), log-barrier stochastic gradient descent (LB-SGD), policy improvement with black-box (PIBB), and offline Q-learning with Mamba backbones (Q-Mamba). We also review benchmark efforts such as the NeurIPS 2020 BBO Challenge and the MetaBox framework. Overall, we highlight how ML and RL transform classical inexact solvers into more scalable, robust, and adaptive frameworks for real-world optimization.

We study online task allocation for multi-robot, multi-queue systems with stochastic arrivals and switching delays. Time is slotted; each location can host at most one robot per slot; service consumes one slot; switching between locations incurs a one-slot travel delay; and arrivals are independent Bernoulli processes. We formulate a discounted-cost Markov decision process and propose Exhaustive-Serve-Longest (ESL), a simple real-time policy that serves exhaustively when the current location is nonempty and, when idle, switches to a longest unoccupied nonempty location, and we prove the optimality of this policy. As baselines, we tune a fixed-dwell cyclic policy via a discrete-time delay expression and implement a first-come-first-serve policy. Across server-to-location ratios and loads, ESL consistently yields lower discounted holding cost and smaller mean queue lengths, with action-time fractions showing more serving and restrained switching. Its simplicity and robustness make ESL a practical default for real-time multi-robot scheduling systems.

Combinatorial optimization problems are traditionally tackled with handcrafted heuristic algorithms, which demand extensive domain expertise and significant implementation effort. Recent progress has highlighted the potential of automatic heuristics design powered by large language models (LLMs), enabling the automatic generation and refinement of heuristics. These approaches typically maintain a population of heuristics and employ LLMs as mutation operators to evolve them across generations. While effective, such methods often risk stagnating in local optima. To address this issue, we propose the Experience-Guided Reflective Co-Evolution of Prompt and Heuristics (EvoPH) for automatic algorithm design, a novel framework that integrates the island migration model with the elites selection algorithm to simulate diverse heuristics populations. In EvoPH, prompts are co-evolved with heuristic algorithms, guided by performance feedback. We evaluate our framework on two problems, i.e., Traveling Salesman Problem and Bin Packing Problem. Experimental results demonstrate that EvoPH achieves the lowest relative error against optimal solutions across both datasets, advancing the field of automatic algorithm design with LLMs.

In modern logistics management systems, route planning requires high efficiency. The Open Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (OCVRP) deals with finding optimal delivery routes for a fleet of vehicles serving geographically distributed customers, without requiring the vehicles to return to the depot after deliveries. The present study is comparative in nature and speaks of two algorithms for OCVRP solution: Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), a nature-inspired metaheuristic; and Google OR-Tools, an industry-standard toolkit for optimization. Both implementations were developed in Python and using a custom dataset. Performance appraisal was based on routing efficiency, computation time, and scalability. The results show that ACO allows flexibility in routing parameters while OR-Tools runs much faster with more consistency and requires less input. This could help choose among routing strategies for scalable real-time logistics systems.

This paper presents an evolutionary framework for the training of large language models(LLM). The models are divided into several experts(sub-networks), which have the same structure but different parameter values. Only one expert is trained at each step. After the classical AdamW optimization, some evolutionary operators(crossover, PSO, and mutation) act on the tensor weights between the current expert and the best expert. So current expert would learn the experience of best expert. The direction of best expert would help current expert's loss decrease faster. Finally, only save the weight of the best expert. Experiments show that best expert would achieve nearly the same accuracy as the full model. This would greatly reduce the size of the model for inference. Since only one expert is trained at each step, the training needs much less memory and has much higher throughput. Experiments show that the throughput would accelerate more than ten times! Our source code is available. It's a pure c++/cu framework, which is suitable for easy deployment on PCs and edge computing devices.

Abstract--In recent years, the generation of diverse game levels has gained increasing interest, contributing to a richer and more engaging gaming experience. A number of level diversity metrics have been proposed in literature, which are naturally multi-dimensional, leading to conflicted, complementary, or both relationships among these dimensions. However, existing level generation approaches often fail to comprehensively assess diversity across those dimensions. This paper aims to expand horizons of level diversity by considering multi-dimensional diversity when training generative models. We formulate the model training as a multi-objective learning problem, where each diversity metric is treated as a distinct objective. Furthermore, a multi-objective evolutionary learning framework that optimises multiple diversity metrics simultaneously throughout the model training process is proposed. Our case study on the commonly used benchmark Super Mario Bros. demonstrates that our proposed framework can enhance multi-dimensional diversity and identify a Pareto front of generative models, which provides a range of tradeoffs among playability and two representative diversity metrics, including a content-based one and a player-centered one. Such capability enables decision-makers to make informed choices when selecting generators accommodating a variety of scenarios and the diverse needs of players and designers. Impact Statement--Artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) techniques offer a new paradigm of content creation and have numerous applications in several industry sectors, including digital games. Evaluating game levels is crucial and should consider different aspects, with diversity being one of the most important. Multiple content-based and player-centered metrics have been proposed for measuring level diversity.

The NP-complete mutual-visibility (MV) problem currently lacks empirical analysis on its practical behaviour despite theoretical studies. This paper addresses this gap by implementing and evaluating three distinct algorithms -- a direct random heuristic, a hypergraph-based approximation, and a genetic algorithm -- on diverse synthetic graph datasets, including those with analytically known $μ(G)$ values and general graph models. Our results demonstrate that for smaller graphs, the algorithms consistently achieve MV set sizes aligning with theoretical bounds. However, for larger instances, achieved solution sizes notably diverge from theoretical limits; this, combined with the absence of tight bounds, complicates absolute quality assessment. Nevertheless, validation on known optimal graphs showed the Genetic Algorithm and other heuristics empirically performing best among tested methods.