DNA microarray gene-expression data has been widely used to identify cancerous gene signatures. Microarray can increase the accuracy of cancer diagnosis and prognosis. However, analyzing the large amount of gene expression data from microarray chips pose a challenge for current machine learning researches. One of the challenges lie within classification of healthy and cancerous tissues is high dimensionality of gene expressions. High dimensionality decreases the accuracy of the classification. This research aims to apply a hybrid model of Genetic Algorithm and Neural Network to overcome the problem during subset selection of informative genes. Whereby, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) reduced dimensionality during feature selection and then a Multi-Layer perceptron Neural Network (MLP) is applied to classify selected genes. The performance evaluated by considering to the accuracy and the number of selected genes. Experimental results show the proposed method suggested high accuracy and minimum number of selected genes in comparison with other machine learning algorithms.

In a variety of domains, from robotics to finance, Quality-Diversity algorithms have been used to generate collections of both diverse and high-performing solutions. Multi-Objective Quality-Diversity algorithms have emerged as a promising approach for applying these methods to complex, multi-objective problems. However, existing methods are limited by their search capabilities. For example, Multi-Objective Map-Elites depends on random genetic variations which struggle in high-dimensional search spaces. Despite efforts to enhance search efficiency with gradient-based mutation operators, existing approaches consider updating solutions to improve on each objective separately rather than achieving desired trade-offs. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing Multi-Objective Map-Elites with Preference-Conditioned Policy-Gradient and Crowding Mechanisms: a new Multi-Objective Quality-Diversity algorithm that uses preference-conditioned policy-gradient mutations to efficiently discover promising regions of the objective space and crowding mechanisms to promote a uniform distribution of solutions on the Pareto front. We evaluate our approach on six robotics locomotion tasks and show that our method outperforms or matches all state-of-the-art Multi-Objective Quality-Diversity methods in all six, including two newly proposed tri-objective tasks. Importantly, our method also achieves a smoother set of trade-offs, as measured by newly-proposed sparsity-based metrics. This performance comes at a lower computational storage cost compared to previous methods.

Robot controllers are often optimised for a single robot in a single environment. This approach proves brittle, as such a controller will often fail to produce sensible behavior for a new morphology or environment. In comparison, animal gaits are robust and versatile. By observing animals, and attempting to extract general principles of locomotion from their movement, we aim to design a single decentralised controller applicable to diverse morphologies and environments. The controller implements the three components 1) undulation, 2) peristalsis, and 3) leg motion, which we believe are the essential elements in most animal gaits. The controller is tested on a variety of simulated centipede-like robots. The centipede is chosen as inspiration because it moves using both body contractions and legged locomotion. For a controller to work in qualitatively different settings, it must also be able to exhibit qualitatively different behaviors. We find that six different modes of locomotion emerge from our controller in response to environmental and morphological changes. We also find that different parts of the centipede model can exhibit different modes of locomotion, simultaneously, based on local morphological features. This controller can potentially aid in the design or evolution of robots, by quickly testing the potential of a morphology, or be used to get insights about underlying locomotion principles in the centipede.

We discuss the possibility of world models and active exploration as emergent properties of open-ended behavior optimization in autonomous agents. In discussing the source of the open-endedness of living things, we start from the perspective of biological systems as understood by the mechanistic approach of theoretical biology and artificial life. From this perspective, we discuss the potential of homeostasis in particular as an open-ended objective for autonomous agents and as a general, integrative extrinsic motivation. We then discuss the possibility of implicitly acquiring a world model and active exploration through the internal dynamics of a network, and a hypothetical architecture for this, by combining meta-reinforcement learning, which assumes domain adaptation as a system that achieves robust homeostasis.

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized learning approach that protects sensitive information by utilizing local model parameters rather than sharing clients' raw datasets. While this privacy-preserving method is widely employed across various applications, it still requires significant development and optimization. Automated Machine Learning (Auto-ML) has been adapted for reducing the need for manual adjustments. Previous studies have explored the integration of AutoML with different FL algorithms to evaluate their effectiveness in enhancing FL settings. However, Automated FL (Auto-FL) faces additional challenges due to the involvement of a large cohort of clients and global training rounds between clients and the server, rendering the tuning process time-consuming and nearly impossible on resource-constrained edge devices (e.g., IoT devices). This paper investigates the deployment and integration of two lightweight Hyper-Parameter Optimization (HPO) tools, Raytune and Optuna, within the context of FL settings. A step-wise feedback mechanism has also been designed to accelerate the hyper-parameter tuning process and coordinate AutoML toolkits with the FL server. To this end, both local and global feedback mechanisms are integrated to limit the search space and expedite the HPO process. Further, a novel client selection technique is introduced to mitigate the straggler effect in Auto-FL. The selected hyper-parameter tuning tools are evaluated using two benchmark datasets, FEMNIST, and CIFAR10. Further, the paper discusses the essential properties of successful HPO tools, the integration mechanism with the FL pipeline, and the challenges posed by the distributed and heterogeneous nature of FL environments.

This paper investigates the role of communication in improving coordination within robot swarms, focusing on a paradigm where learning and execution occur simultaneously in a decentralized manner. We highlight the role communication can play in addressing the credit assignment problem (individual contribution to the overall performance), and how it can be influenced by it. We propose a taxonomy of existing and future works on communication, focusing on information selection and physical abstraction as principal axes for classification: from low-level lossless compression with raw signal extraction and processing to high-level lossy compression with structured communication models. The paper reviews current research from evolutionary robotics, multi-agent (deep) reinforcement learning, language models, and biophysics models to outline the challenges and opportunities of communication in a collective of robots that continuously learn from one another through local message exchanges, illustrating a form of social learning.

Molecular optimization, which aims to discover improved molecules from a vast chemical search space, is a critical step in chemical development. Various artificial intelligence technologies have demonstrated high effectiveness and efficiency on molecular optimization tasks. However, few of these technologies focus on balancing property optimization with constraint satisfaction, making it difficult to obtain high-quality molecules that not only possess desirable properties but also meet various constraints. To address this issue, we propose a constrained multi-property molecular optimization framework (CMOMO), which is a flexible and efficient method to simultaneously optimize multiple molecular properties while satisfying several drug-like constraints. CMOMO improves multiple properties of molecules with constraints based on dynamic cooperative optimization, which dynamically handles the constraints across various scenarios. Besides, CMOMO evaluates multiple properties within discrete chemical spaces cooperatively with the evolution of molecules within an implicit molecular space to guide the evolutionary search. Experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed CMOMO over five state-of-the-art molecular optimization methods on two benchmark tasks of simultaneously optimizing multiple non-biological activity properties while satisfying two structural constraints. Furthermore, the practical applicability of CMOMO is verified on two practical tasks, where it identified a collection of candidate ligands of $\beta$2-adrenoceptor GPCR and candidate inhibitors of glycogen synthase kinase-3$\beta$ with high properties and under drug-like constraints.

In this paper, we address the problem of feature selection in the context of multi-label learning, by using a new estimator based on implicit regularization and label embedding. Unlike the sparse feature selection methods that use a penalized estimator with explicit regularization terms such as $l_{2,1}$-norm, MCP or SCAD, we propose a simple alternative method via Hadamard product parameterization. In order to guide the feature selection process, a latent semantic of multi-label information method is adopted, as a label embedding. Experimental results on some known benchmark datasets suggest that the proposed estimator suffers much less from extra bias, and may lead to benign overfitting.

This paper presents a data-driven electrical machine design (EMD) framework using wound-rotor synchronous generator (WRSG) as a design example. Unlike traditional preliminary EMD processes that heavily rely on expertise, this framework leverages an artificial-intelligence based expert database, to provide preliminary designs directly from user specifications. Initial data is generated using 2D finite element (FE) machine models by sweeping fundamental design variables including machine length and diameter, enabling scalable machine geometry with machine performance for each design is recorded. This data trains a Metamodel of Optimal Prognosis (MOP)-based surrogate model, which maps design variables to key performance indicators (KPIs). Once trained, guided by metaheuristic algorithms, the surrogate model can generate thousands of geometric scalable designs, covering a wide power range, forming an AI expert database to guide future preliminary design. The framework is validated with a 30kVA WRSG design case. A prebuilt WRSG database, covering power from 10 to 60kVA, is validated by FE simulation. Design No.1138 is selected from database and compared with conventional design. Results show No.1138 achieves a higher power density of 2.21 kVA/kg in just 5 seconds, compared to 2.02 kVA/kg obtained using traditional method, which take several days. The developed AI expert database also serves as a high-quality data source for further developing AI models for automatic electrical machine design.

Effective training of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on resource-constrained client devices in Federated Learning (FL) requires the usage of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies. To this end, we demonstrate the impact of two factors \textit{viz.}, client-specific layer importance score that selects the most important VLM layers for fine-tuning and inter-client layer diversity score that encourages diverse layer selection across clients for optimal VLM layer selection. We first theoretically motivate and leverage the principal eigenvalue magnitude of layerwise Neural Tangent Kernels and show its effectiveness as client-specific layer importance score. Next, we propose a novel layer updating strategy dubbed F$^3$OCUS that jointly optimizes the layer importance and diversity factors by employing a data-free, multi-objective, meta-heuristic optimization on the server. We explore 5 different meta-heuristic algorithms and compare their effectiveness for selecting model layers and adapter layers towards PEFT-FL. Furthermore, we release a new MedVQA-FL dataset involving overall 707,962 VQA triplets and 9 modality-specific clients and utilize it to train and evaluate our method. Overall, we conduct more than 10,000 client-level experiments on 6 Vision-Language FL task settings involving 58 medical image datasets and 4 different VLM architectures of varying sizes to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.