Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms (RHEA) are a class of online planning methods for real-time game playing; their performance is closely related to the planning horizon and the search time allowed. In this paper, we propose to learn a prior for RHEA in an offline manner by training a value network and a policy network. The value network is used to reduce the planning horizon by providing an estimation of future rewards, and the policy network is used to initialize the population, which helps to narrow down the search scope. The proposed algorithm, named prior-based RHEA (p-RHEA), trains policy and value networks by performing planning and learning iteratively. In the planning stage, the horizon-limited search assisted with the policy network and value network is performed to improve the policies and collect training samples. In the learning stage, the policy network and value network are trained with the collected samples to learn better prior knowledge. Experimental results on OpenAI Gym MuJoCo tasks show that the performance of the proposed p-RHEA is significantly improved compared to that of RHEA.

Web services are basic functions of a software system to support the concept of service-oriented architecture. They are often composed together to provide added values, known as web service composition. Researchers often employ Evolutionary Computation techniques to efficiently construct composite services with near-optimized functional quality (i.e., Quality of Semantic Matchmaking) or non-functional quality (i.e., Quality of Service) or both due to the complexity of this problem. With a significant increase in service composition requests, many composition requests have similar input and output requirements but may vary due to different preferences from different user segments. This problem is often treated as a multi-objective service composition so as to cope with different preferences from different user segments simultaneously. Without taking a multi-objective approach that gives rise to a solution selection challenge, we perceive multiple similar service composition requests as jointly forming an evolutionary multi-tasking problem in this work. We propose an effective permutation-based evolutionary multi-tasking approach that can simultaneously generate a set of solutions, with one for each service request. We also introduce a neighborhood structure over multiple tasks to allow newly evolved solutions to be evaluated on related tasks. Our proposed method can perform better at the cost of only a fraction of time, compared to one state-of-art single-tasking EC-based method. We also found that the use of the proper neighborhood structure can enhance the effectiveness of our approach.

Controller placement problem (CPP) is a key issue for Software-Defined Networking (SDN) with distributed controller architectures. This problem aims to determine a suitable number of controllers deployed in important locations so as to optimize the overall network performance. In comparison to communication delay, existing literature on the CPP assumes that the influence of controller workload distribution on network performance is negligible. In this paper, we tackle the CPP that simultaneously considers the communication delay, the control plane utilization, and the controller workload distribution. Due to this reason, our CPP is intrinsically different from and clearly more difficult than any previously studied CPPs that are NP-hard. To tackle this challenging issue, we develop a new algorithm that seamlessly integrates the genetic algorithm (GA) and the gradient descent (GD) optimization method. Particularly, GA is used to search for suitable CPP solutions. The quality of each solution is further evaluated through GD. Simulation results on two representative network scenarios (small-scale and large-scale) show that our algorithm can effectively strike the trade-off between the control plane utilization and the network response time.

We present a Bayesian multi-objective optimisation algorithm that allows the user to express preference-order constraints on the objectives of the type `objective A is more important than objective B'. Rather than attempting to find a representative subset of the complete Pareto front, our algorithm searches for and returns only those Pareto-optimal points that satisfy these constraints. We formulate a new acquisition function based on expected improvement in dominated hypervolume (EHI) to ensure that the subset of Pareto front satisfying the constraints is thoroughly explored. The hypervolume calculation only includes those points that satisfy the preference-order constraints, where the probability of a point satisfying the constraints is calculated from a gradient Gaussian Process model. We demonstrate our algorithm on both synthetic and real-world problems.

Abstract--The Interaction-Transformation (IT) is a new representation for Symbolic Regression that restricts the search space into simpler, but expressive, function forms. This representation has the advantage of creating a smoother search space unlike the space generated by Expression Trees, the common representation used in Genetic Programming. This paper introduces an Evolutionary Algorithmcapable of evolving a population of IT expressions supported only by the mutation operator. The results show that this representation is capable of finding better approximations to real-world data sets when compared to traditional approaches and a state-of-the-art Genetic Programming algorithm. I. INTRODUCTION Regression analysis has the objective of describing the relationship between measurable variables [1]. This analysis can be used to make predictions of not yet observed samples, to study a system's behavior or to calculate the statistical properties of such system. F. O. de Franca is with Federal University of ABC, Center for Mathematics, Computationand Cognition, Heuristics, Analysis and Learning Laboratory, São Paulo, Brazil, email: folivetti@ufabc.edu.br,

Creativity, a process that generates novel and valuable ideas, involves increased association between task-positive (control) and task-negative (default) networks in brain. Inspired by this seminal finding, in this study we propose a creative decoder that directly modulates the neuronal activation pattern, while sampling from the learned latent space. The proposed approach is fully unsupervised and can be used as off-the-shelf. Our experiments on three different image datasets (MNIST, FMNIST, CELEBA) reveal that the co-activation between task-positive and task-negative neurons during decoding in a deep neural net enables generation of novel artifacts. We further identify sufficient conditions on several novelty metrics towards measuring the creativity of generated samples.

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems often feature deceptive local optima, and learning methods that optimize purely for reward signal often fail to learn strategies for overcoming them. Deep neuroevolution and novelty search have been proposed as effective alternatives to gradient-based methods for learning RL policies directly from pixels. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate the use of novelty search over agent action sequences by string edit metric distance as a means for promoting innovation. We also introduce a method for stagnation detection and population resampling inspired by recent developments in the RL community that uses the same mechanisms as novelty search to promote and develop innovative policies. Our methods extend a state-of-the-art method for deep neuroevolution using a simple-yet-effective genetic algorithm (GA) designed to efficiently learn deep RL policy network weights. Experiments using four games from the Atari 2600 benchmark were conducted. Results provide further evidence that GAs are competitive with gradient-based algorithms for deep RL. Results also demonstrate that novelty search over action sequences is an effective source of selection pressure that can be integrated into existing evolutionary algorithms for deep RL.

In January 2019, DeepMind revealed AlphaStar to the world-the first artificial intelligence (AI) system to beat a professional player at the game of StarCraft II-representing a milestone in the progress of AI. AlphaStar draws on many areas of AI research, including deep learning, reinforcement learning, game theory, and evolutionary computation (EC). In this paper we analyze AlphaStar primarily through the lens of EC, presenting a new look at the system and relating it to many concepts in the field. We highlight some of its most interesting aspects-the use of Lamarckian evolution, competitive co-evolution, and quality diversity. In doing so, we hope to provide a bridge between the wider EC community and one of the most significant AI systems developed in recent times.

Section is a key area of investigation for video game research 2 describes the large amount of background and related (Hendrikx et al. 2013; Togelius et al. 2011). PLG work, both for Angry Birds and adaptive level generation in can be extremely useful for increasing a game's length and general. Section 3 presents our proposed adaptive generation replayability, as it allows a large number of levels to be created method. Section 4 describes our conducted experiments and in a relatively short time. It is also possible to tailor the results. Sections 5 discusses what these results could mean generated levels towards specific user's playstyles, known as for both human players and agents, Section 6 concludes this adaptive level generation, which allows for a unique and personalised work and outlines future possibilities.

AI software is still software. Software engineers need better tools to make better use of AI software. For example, for software defect prediction and software text mining, the default tunings for software analytics tools can be improved with "hyperparameter optimization" tools that decide (e.g.,) how many trees are needed in a random forest. Hyperparameter optimization is unnecessarily slow when optimizers waste time exploring redundant options (i.e., pairs of tunings with indistinguishably different results). By ignoring redundant tunings, the Dodge(E) hyperparameter optimization tool can run orders of magnitude faster, yet still find better tunings than prior state-of-the-art algorithms (for software defect prediction and software text mining).