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Large Language Model (LLM) image recognition is a powerful tool for extracting data from images, but accuracy depends on providing sufficient cues in the prompt - requiring a domain expert for specialized tasks. We introduce Cue Learning using Evolution for Accurate Recognition (CLEAR), which uses a combination of LLMs and evolutionary computation to generate and optimize cues such that recognition of specialized features in images is improved. It achieves this by auto-generating a novel domain-specific representation and then using it to optimize suitable textual cues with a genetic algorithm. We apply CLEAR to the real-world task of identifying sustainability data from interior and exterior images of buildings. We investigate the effects of using a variable-length representation compared to fixed-length and show how LLM consistency can be improved by refactoring from categorical to real-valued estimates. We show that CLEAR enables higher accuracy compared to expert human recognition and human-authored prompts in every task with error rates improved by up to two orders of magnitude and an ablation study evincing solution concision., Comment: 9 pages plus 2 pages of supplemental material

When data on building features is unavailable, the task of determining how to improve that building in terms of carbon emissions becomes infeasible. We show that from only a set of images, a Large Language Model with appropriate prompt engineering and domain knowledge can successfully estimate a range of building features relevant for sustainability calculations. We compare our novel image-to-data method with a ground truth comprising real building data for 47 apartments and achieve accuracy better than a human performing the same task. We also demonstrate that the method can generate tailored recommendations to the owner on how best to improve their properties and discuss methods to scale the approach., Comment: 6 pages

Consumers wish to choose sustainable accommodation for their travels, and in the case of corporations, may be required to do so. Yet accommodation marketplaces provide no meaningful capability for sustainable choice: typically CO2 estimates are provided that are identical for all accommodation of the same type across an entire country. We propose a decision support system that enables real choice of sustainable accommodation. We develop a data-driven address-specific metric called EcoGrade, which integrates government approved datasets and uses interpolation where data is sparse. We validate the metric on 10,000 UK addresses in 10 cities, showing the match of our interpolations to reality is statistically significant. We show how the metric has been embedded into a decision support system for a global accommodation marketplace and tested by real users over several months with positive user feedback. In the EU, forty percent of final energy consumption is from buildings. We need to encourage all building owners to make their accommodation more efficient. The rental sector is one area where change can occur rapidly, as rented accommodation is renovated frequently. We anticipate our decision support system using EcoGrade will encourage this positive change., Comment: 8 pages

Conceptual architecture involves a highly creative exploration of novel ideas, often taken from other disciplines as architects consider radical new forms, materials, textures and colors for buildings. While today's generative AI systems can produce remarkable results, they lack the creativity demonstrated for decades by evolutionary algorithms. SCAPE, our proposed tool, combines evolutionary search with generative AI, enabling users to explore creative and good quality designs inspired by their initial input through a simple point and click interface. SCAPE injects randomness into generative AI, and enables memory, making use of the built-in language skills of GPT-4 to vary prompts via text-based mutation and crossover. We demonstrate that compared to DALL-E 3, SCAPE enables a 67% improvement in image novelty, plus improvements in quality and effectiveness of use; we show that in just three iterations SCAPE has a 24% image novelty increase enabling effective exploration, plus optimization of images by users. We use more than 20 independent architects to assess SCAPE, who provide markedly positive feedback., Comment: 8 pages

The use of autonomous robots for delivery of goods to customers is an exciting new way to provide a reliable and sustainable service. However, in the real world, autonomous robots still require human supervision for safety reasons. We tackle the realworld problem of optimizing autonomous robot timings to maximize deliveries, while ensuring that there are never too many robots running simultaneously so that they can be monitored safely. We assess the use of a recent hybrid machine-learningoptimization approach COIL (constrained optimization in learned latent space) and compare it with a baseline genetic algorithm for the purposes of exploring variations of this problem. We also investigate new methods for improving the speed and efficiency of COIL. We show that only COIL can find valid solutions where appropriate numbers of robots run simultaneously for all problem variations tested. We also show that when COIL has learned its latent representation, it can optimize 10% faster than the GA, making it a good choice for daily re-optimization of robots where delivery requests for each day are allocated to robots while maintaining safe numbers of robots running at once., Comment: 10 pages including 1 page supplemental

If human societies are so complex, then how can we hope to understand them? Artificial Life gives us one answer. The field of Artificial Life comprises a diverse set of introspective studies that largely ask the same questions, albeit from many different perspectives: Why are we here? Who are we? Why do we behave as we do? Starting with the origins of life provides us with fascinating answers to some of these questions. However, some researchers choose to bring their studies closer to the present day. We are after all, human. It has been a few billion years since our ancestors were self-replicating molecules. Thus, more direct studies of ourselves and our human societies can reveal truths that may lead to practical knowledge. The papers in this special issue bring together scientists who choose to perform this kind of research., Comment: extended version with references

We present a temporally extended variation of the successor representation, which we term t-SR. t-SR captures the expected state transition dynamics of temporally extended actions by constructing successor representations over primitive action repeats. This form of temporal abstraction does not learn a top-down hierarchy of pertinent task structures, but rather a bottom-up composition of coupled actions and action repetitions. This lessens the amount of decisions required in control without learning a hierarchical policy. As such, t-SR directly considers the time horizon of temporally extended action sequences without the need for predefined or domain-specific options. We show that in environments with dynamic reward structure, t-SR is able to leverage both the flexibility of the successor representation and the abstraction afforded by temporally extended actions. Thus, in a series of sparsely rewarded gridworld environments, t-SR optimally adapts learnt policies far faster than comparable value-based, model-free reinforcement learning methods. We also show that the manner in which t-SR learns to solve these tasks requires the learnt policy to be sampled consistently less often than non-temporally extended policies., Comment: Presented at the 5th Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM) 2022

Teams are central to human accomplishment. Over the past half-century, psychologists have identified the Big-Five cross-culturally valid personality variables: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness. The first four have shown consistent relationships with team performance. Agreeableness (being harmonious, altruistic, humble, and cooperative), however, has demonstrated a non-significant and highly variable relationship with team performance. We resolve this inconsistency through computational modelling. An agent-based model (ABM) is used to predict the effects of personality traits on teamwork and a genetic algorithm is then used to explore the limits of the ABM in order to discover which traits correlate with best and worst performing teams for a problem with different levels of uncertainty (noise). New dependencies revealed by the exploration are corroborated by analyzing previously-unseen data from one the largest datasets on team performance to date comprising 3,698 individuals in 593 teams working on more than 5,000 group tasks with and without uncertainty, collected over a 10-year period. Our finding is that the dependency between team performance and Agreeableness is moderated by task uncertainty. Combining evolutionary computation with ABMs in this way provides a new methodology for the scientific investigation of teamwork, making new predictions, and improving our understanding of human behaviors. Our results confirm the potential usefulness of computer modelling for developing theory, as well as shedding light on the future of teams as work environments are becoming increasingly fluid and uncertain., Comment: Final version (open access) as published in journal

Real-world design problems are a messy combination of constraints, objectives, and features. Exploring these problem spaces can be defined as a Multi-Criteria Exploration (MCX) problem, whose goals are to produce a set of diverse solutions with high performance across many objectives, while avoiding low performance across any objectives. Quality-Diversity algorithms produce the needed design variation, but typically consider only a single objective. We present a new ranking, T-DominO, specifically designed to handle multiple objectives in MCX problems. T-DominO ranks individuals relative to other solutions in the archive, favoring individuals with balanced performance over those which excel at a few objectives at the cost of the others. Keeping only a single balanced solution in each MAP-Elites bin maintains the visual accessibility of the archive -- a strong asset for design exploration. We illustrate our approach on a set of easily understood benchmarks, and showcase its potential in a many-objective real-world architecture case study., Comment: Originally published in: Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN)

Constrained optimization problems can be difficult because their search spaces have properties not conducive to search, e.g., multimodality, discontinuities, or deception. To address such difficulties, considerable research has been performed on creating novel evolutionary algorithms or specialized genetic operators. However, if the representation that defined the search space could be altered such that it only permitted valid solutions that satisfied the constraints, the task of finding the optimal would be made more feasible without any need for specialized optimization algorithms. We propose Constrained Optimization in Latent Space (COIL), which uses a VAE to generate a learned latent representation from a dataset comprising samples from the valid region of the search space according to a constraint, thus enabling the optimizer to find the objective in the new space defined by the learned representation. Preliminary experiments show promise: compared to an identical GA using a standard representation that cannot meet the constraints or find fit solutions, COIL with its learned latent representation can perfectly satisfy different types of constraints while finding high-fitness solutions., Comment: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (GECCO '22 Companion). ACM, Boston, USA, 8 pages

We propose PiNet, a generalised differentiable attention-based pooling mechanism for utilising graph convolution operations for graph level classification. We demonstrate high sample efficiency and superior performance over other graph neural networks in distinguishing isomorphic graph classes, as well as competitive results with state of the art methods on standard chemo-informatics datasets., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures 1 table

Maintaining the ability to fire sparsely is crucial for information encoding in neural networks. Additionally, spiking homeostasis is vital for spiking neural networks with changing numbers of weights and neurons. We discuss a range of network stabilisation approaches, inspired by homeostatic synaptic plasticity mechanisms reported in the brain. These include weight scaling, and weight change as a function of the network's spiking activity. We tested normalisation of the sum of weights for all neurons, and by neuron type. We examined how this approach affects firing rate and performance on clustering of time-series data in the form of moving geometric shapes. We found that neuron type-specific normalisation is a promising approach for preventing weight drift in spiking neural networks, thus enabling longer training cycles. It can be adapted for networks with architectural plasticity., Comment: Developmental Neural Networks Workshop, The 2019 Conference on Artificial Life (ALife 2019). Newcastle, United Kingdom

We propose an end-to-end deep learning learning model for graph classification and representation learning that is invariant to permutation of the nodes of the input graphs. We address the challenge of learning a fixed size graph representation for graphs of varying dimensions through a differentiable node attention pooling mechanism. In addition to a theoretical proof of its invariance to permutation, we provide empirical evidence demonstrating the statistically significant gain in accuracy when faced with an isomorphic graph classification task given only a small number of training examples. We analyse the effect of four different matrices to facilitate the local message passing mechanism by which graph convolutions are performed vs. a matrix parametrised by a learned parameter pair able to transition smoothly between the former. Finally, we show that our model achieves competitive classification performance with existing techniques on a set of molecule datasets., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures

Graph classification is a significant problem in many scientific domains. It addresses tasks such as the classification of proteins and chemical compounds into categories according to their functions, or chemical and structural properties. In a supervised setting, this problem can be framed as learning the structure, features and relationships between features within a set of labelled graphs and being able to correctly predict the labels or categories of unseen graphs. A significant difficulty in this task arises when attempting to apply established classification algorithms due to the requirement for fixed size matrix or tensor representations of the graphs which may vary greatly in their numbers of nodes and edges. Building on prior work combining explicit tensor representations with a standard image-based classifier, we propose a model to perform graph classification by extracting fixed size tensorial information from each graph in a given set, and using a Capsule Network to perform classification. The graphs we consider here are undirected and with categorical features on the nodes. Using standard benchmarking chemical and protein datasets, we demonstrate that our graph Capsule Network classification model using an explicit tensorial representation of the graphs is competitive with current state of the art graph kernels and graph neural network models despite only limited hyper-parameter searching., Comment: This work has been submitted to the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2019

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution's creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems.

The use of artificial immune systems in intrusion detection is an appealing concept for two reasons. Firstly, the human immune system provides the human body with a high level of protection from invading pathogens, in a robust, self-organised and distributed manner. Secondly, current techniques used in computer security are not able to cope with the dynamic and increasingly complex nature of computer systems and their security. It is hoped that biologically inspired approaches in this area, including the use of immune-based systems will be able to meet this challenge. Here we review the algorithms used, the development of the systems and the outcome of their implementation. We provide an introduction and analysis of the key developments within this field, in addition to making suggestions for future research.

We present ideas about creating a next generation Intrusion Detection System based on the latest immunological theories. The central challenge with computer security is determining the difference between normal and potentially harmful activity. For half a century, developers have protected their systems by coding rules that identify and block specific events. However, the nature of current and future threats in conjunction with ever larger IT systems urgently requires the development of automated and adaptive defensive tools. A promising solution is emerging in the form of Artificial Immune Systems. The Human Immune System can detect and defend against harmful and previously unseen invaders, so can we not build a similar Intrusion Detection System for our computers.

This paper examines the four main types of Evolutionary Design by computers: Evolutionary Design Optimisation, Evolutionary Art, Evolutionary Artificial Life Forms and Creative Evolutionary Design. Definitions for all four areas are provided. A review of current work in each of these areas is given, with examples of the types of applications that have been tackled. The different properties and requirements of each are examined. Descriptions of typical representations and evolutionary algorithms are provided and examples of designs evolved using these techniques are shown. The paper then discusses how the boundaries of these areas are beginning to merge, resulting in four new 'overlapping' types of Evolutionary Design: Integral Evolutionary Design, Artificial Life Based Evolutionary Design, Aesthetic Evolutionary AL and Aesthetic Evolutionary Design. Finally, the last part of the paper discusses some common problems faced by creators of Evolutionary Design systems, including: interdependent elements in designs, epistasis, and constraint handling., Comment: In Proceedings of the 3rd On-line World Conference on Soft Computing in Engineering Design and Manufacturing (WSC3)