Evolutionary Systems
Development of a Multiprocessing Interface Genetic Algorithm for Optimising a Multilayer Perceptron for Disease Prediction
Iliyas, Iliyas Ibrahim, Boukari, Souley, Gital, Abdulsalam Yau
This study introduces a framework that integrates nonlinear feature extraction, classification, and efficient optimization. First, kernel principal component analysis with a radial basis function kernel reduces dimensionality while preserving 95% of the variance. Second, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) learns to predict disease status. Finally, a modified multiprocessing genetic algorithm (MIGA) optimizes MLP hyperparameters in parallel over ten generations. We evaluated this approach on three datasets: the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer dataset, the Parkinson's Telemonitoring dataset, and the chronic kidney disease dataset. The MLP tuned by the MIGA achieved the best accuracy of 99.12% for breast cancer, 94.87% for Parkinson's disease, and 100% for chronic kidney disease. These results outperform those of other methods, such as grid search, random search, and Bayesian optimization. Compared with a standard genetic algorithm, kernel PCA revealed nonlinear relationships that improved classification, and the MIGA's parallel fitness evaluations reduced the tuning time by approximately 60%. The genetic algorithm incurs high computational cost from sequential fitness evaluations, but our multiprocessing interface GA (MIGA) parallelizes this step, slashing the tuning time and steering the MLP toward the best accuracy score of 99.12%, 94.87%, and 100% for breast cancer, Parkinson's disease, and CKD, respectively.
Robust Dynamic Material Handling via Adaptive Constrained Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning
Hu, Chengpeng, Wang, Ziming, Yuan, Bo, Liu, Jialin, Zhang, Chengqi, Yao, Xin
--Dynamic material handling (DMH) involves the assignment of dynamically arriving material transporting tasks to suitable vehicles in real time for minimising makespan and tardiness. In real-world scenarios, historical task records are usually available, which enables the training of a decision policy on multiple instances consisting of historical records. Recently, reinforcement learning has been applied to solve DMH. Due to the occurrence of dynamic events such as new tasks, adaptability is highly required. Solving DMH is challenging since constraints including task delay should be satisfied. A feedback is received only when all tasks are served, which leads to sparse reward. Besides, making the best use of limited computational resources and historical records for training a robust policy is crucial. The time allocated to different problem instances would highly impact the learning process. T o tackle those challenges, this paper proposes a novel adaptive constrained evolutionary reinforcement learning (ACERL) approach, which maintains a population of actors for diverse exploration. ACERL accesses each actor for tackling sparse rewards and constraint violation to restrict the behaviour of the policy. Moreover, ACERL adaptively selects the most beneficial training instances for improving the policy. Extensive experiments on eight training and eight unseen test instances demonstrate the outstanding performance of ACERL compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms. Policies trained by ACERL can schedule the vehicles while fully satisfying the constraints. Additional experiments on 40 unseen noised instances show the robust performance of ACERL. Cross-validation further presents the overall effectiveness of ACREL. Besides, a rigorous ablation study highlights the coordination and benefits of each ingredient of ACERL. Index T erms --Dynamic material handling, constrained optimisation, evolutionary reinforcement learning, natural evolution strategy, experience-based optimisation. In modern smart logistics such as flexible manufacturing systems and warehouse floors, the need of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) has grown fastly.
Insights on Adversarial Attacks for Tabular Machine Learning via a Systematic Literature Review
Dyrmishi, Salijona, Djilani, Mohamed, Simonetto, Thibault, Ghamizi, Salah, Cordy, Maxime
Adversarial attacks in machine learning have been extensively reviewed in areas like computer vision and NLP, but research on tabular data remains scattered. This paper provides the first systematic literature review focused on adversarial attacks targeting tabular machine learning models. We highlight key trends, categorize attack strategies and analyze how they address practical considerations for real-world applicability. Additionally, we outline current challenges and open research questions. By offering a clear and structured overview, this review aims to guide future efforts in understanding and addressing adversarial vulnerabilities in tabular machine learning.
SwarmAgentic: Towards Fully Automated Agentic System Generation via Swarm Intelligence
Zhang, Yao, Lin, Chenyang, Tang, Shijie, Chen, Haokun, Zhou, Shijie, Ma, Yunpu, Tresp, Volker
The rapid progress of Large Language Models has advanced agentic systems in decision-making, coordination, and task execution. Yet, existing agentic system generation frameworks lack full autonomy, missing from-scratch agent generation, self-optimizing agent functionality, and collaboration, limiting adaptability and scalability. We propose SwarmAgentic, a framework for fully automated agentic system generation that constructs agentic systems from scratch and jointly optimizes agent functionality and collaboration as interdependent components through language-driven exploration. To enable efficient search over system-level structures, SwarmAgentic maintains a population of candidate systems and evolves them via feedback-guided updates, drawing inspiration from Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). We evaluate our method on six real-world, open-ended, and exploratory tasks involving high-level planning, system-level coordination, and creative reasoning. Given only a task description and an objective function, SwarmAgentic outperforms all baselines, achieving a +261.8% relative improvement over ADAS on the TravelPlanner benchmark, highlighting the effectiveness of full automation in structurally unconstrained tasks. This framework marks a significant step toward scalable and autonomous agentic system design, bridging swarm intelligence with fully automated system multi-agent generation. Our code is publicly released at https://yaoz720.github.io/SwarmAgentic/.
Analysis and Optimization of Probabilities of Beneficial Mutation and Crossover Recombination in a Hamming Space
Inspired by Fisher's geometric approach to study beneficial mutations, we analyse probabilities of beneficial mutation and crossover recombination of strings in a general Hamming space with arbitrary finite alphabet. Mutations and recombinations that reduce the distance to an optimum are considered as beneficial. Geometric and combinatorial analysis is used to derive closed-form expressions for transition probabilities between spheres around an optimum giving a complete description of Markov evolution of distances from an optimum over multiple generations. This paves the way for optimization of parameters of mutation and recombination operators. Here we derive optimality conditions for mutation and recombination radii maximizing the probabilities of mutation and crossover into the optimum. The analysis highlights important differences between these evolutionary operators. While mutation can potentially reach any part of the search space, the probability of beneficial mutation decreases with distance to an optimum, and the optimal mutation radius or rate should also decrease resulting in a slow-down of evolution near the optimum. Crossover recombination, on the other hand, acts in a subspace of the search space defined by the current population of strings. However, probabilities of beneficial and deleterious crossover are balanced, and their characteristics, such as variance, are translation invariant in a Hamming space, suggesting that recombination may complement mutation and boost the rate of evolution near the optimum.
Environmental regulation using Plasticoding for the evolution of robots
Miras, Karine, Ferrante, Eliseo, Eiben, A. E.
Evolutionary robot systems are usually affected by the properties of the environment indirectly through selection. In this paper, we present and investigate a system where the environment also has a direct effect: through regulation. We propose a novel robot encoding method where a genotype encodes multiple possible phenotypes, and the incarnation of a robot depends on the environmental conditions taking place in a determined moment of its life. This means that the morphology, controller, and behavior of a robot can change according to the environment. Importantly, this process of development can happen at any moment of a robot lifetime, according to its experienced environmental stimuli. We provide an empirical proof-of-concept, and the analysis of the experimental results shows that Plasticoding improves adaptation (task performance) while leading to different evolved morphologies, controllers, and behaviour.
An electronic-game framework for evaluating coevolutionary algorithms
de Araรบjo, Karine da Silva Miras, de Franรงa, Fabrรญcio Olivetti
One of the common artificial intelligence applications in electronic games consists of making an artificial agent learn how to execute some determined task successfully in a game environment. One way to perform this task is through machine learning algorithms capable of learning the sequence of actions required to win in a given game environment. There are several supervised learning techniques able to learn the correct answer for a problem through examples. However, when learning how to play electronic games, the correct answer might only be known by the end of the game, after all the actions were already taken. Thus, not being possible to measure the accuracy of each individual action to be taken at each time step. A way for dealing with this problem is through Neuroevolution, a method which trains Artificial Neural Networks using evolutionary algorithms. In this article, we introduce a framework for testing optimization algorithms with artificial agent controllers in electronic games, called EvoMan, which is inspired in the action-platformer game Mega Man II. The environment can be configured to run in different experiment modes, as single evolution, coevolution and others. To demonstrate some challenges regarding the proposed platform, as initial experiments we applied Neuroevolution using Genetic Algorithms and the NEAT algorithm, in the context of competitively coevolving two distinct agents in this game.
Toward Safety-First Human-Like Decision Making for Autonomous Vehicles in Time-Varying Traffic Flow
Wang, Xiao, Yu, Junru, Huang, Jun, Wu, Qiong, Vacic, Ljubo, Sun, Changyin
Despite the recent advancements in artificial intelligence technologies have shown great potential in improving transport efficiency and safety, autonomous vehicles(AVs) still face great challenge of driving in time-varying traffic flow, especially in dense and interactive situations. Meanwhile, human have free wills and usually do not make the same decisions even situate in the exactly same scenarios, leading to the data-driven methods suffer from poor migratability and high search cost problems, decreasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the behavior policy. In this research, we propose a safety-first human-like decision-making framework(SF-HLDM) for AVs to drive safely, comfortably, and social compatiblely in effiency. The framework integrates a hierarchical progressive framework, which combines a spatial-temporal attention (S-TA) mechanism for other road users' intention inference, a social compliance estimation module for behavior regulation, and a Deep Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning(DERL) model for expanding the search space efficiently and effectively to make avoidance of falling into the local optimal trap and reduce the risk of overfitting, thus make human-like decisions with interpretability and flexibility. The SF-HLDM framework enables autonomous driving AI agents dynamically adjusts decision parameters to maintain safety margins and adhering to contextually appropriate driving behaviors at the same time.
Is Selection All You Need in Differential Evolution?
Kitamura, Tomofumi, Fukunaga, Alex
Differential Evolution (DE) is a widely used evolutionary algorithm for black-box optimization problems. However, in modern DE implementations, a major challenge lies in the limited population diversity caused by the fixed population size enforced by the generational replacement. Population size is a critical control parameter that significantly affects DE performance. Larger populations inherently contain a more diverse set of individuals, thereby facilitating broader exploration of the search space. Conversely, when the maximum evaluation budgets is constrained, smaller populations focusing on a limited number of promising candidates may be more suitable. Many state-of-the-art DE variants incorporate an archive mechanism, in which a subset of discarded individuals is preserved in an archive during generation replacement and reused in mutation operations. However, maintaining what is essentially a secondary population via an archive introduces additional design considerations, such as policies for insertion, deletion, and appropriate sizing. To address these limitations, we propose a novel DE framework called Unbounded Differential Evolution (UDE), which adds all generated candidates to the population without discarding any individual based on fitness. Unlike conventional DE, which removes inferior individuals during generational replacement, UDE eliminates replacement altogether, along with the associated complexities of archive management and dynamic population sizing. UDE represents a fundamentally new approach to DE, relying solely on selection mechanisms and enabling a more straightforward yet powerful search algorithm.
Evolvable Conditional Diffusion
Wei, Zhao, Ooi, Chin Chun, Gupta, Abhishek, Wong, Jian Cheng, Chiu, Pao-Hsiung, Toh, Sheares Xue Wen, Ong, Yew-Soon
This paper presents an evolvable conditional diffusion method such that black-box, non-differentiable multi-physics models, as are common in domains like computational fluid dynamics and electromagnetics, can be effectively used for guiding the generative process to facilitate autonomous scientific discovery. We formulate the guidance as an optimization problem where one optimizes for a desired fitness function through updates to the descriptive statistic for the denois-ing distribution, and derive an evolution-guided approach from first principles through the lens of probabilistic evolution. Interestingly, the final derived update algorithm is analogous to the update as per common gradient-based guided diffusion models, but without ever having to compute any derivatives. We validate our proposed evolvable diffusion algorithm in two AI for Science scenarios: the automated design of fluidic topology and meta-surface. Results demonstrate that this method effectively generates designs that better satisfy specific optimization objectives without reliance on differentiable proxies, providing an effective means of guidance-based diffusion that can capitalize on the wealth of black-box, non-differentiable multi-physics numerical models common across Science.