Behavioral Program Synthesis With Genetic Programming

Genetic programming (GP) is a popular heuristic methodology of program synthesis with origins in evolutionary computation. In this generate-and-test approach, candidate programs are iteratively produced and evaluated. The latter involves running programs on tests, where they exhibit complex behaviors reflected in changes of variables, registers, or memory. That behavior not only ultimately determines program output, but may also reveal its `hidden qualities' and important characteristics of the considered synthesis problem. However, the conventional GP is oblivious to most of that information and usually cares only about the number of tests passed by a program. This `evaluation bottleneck' leaves search algorithm underinformed about the actual and potential qualities of candidate programs. This book proposes behavioral program synthesis, a conceptual framework that opens GP to detailed information on program behavior in order to make program synthesis more efficient. Several existing and novel mechanisms subscribing to that perspective to varying extent are presented and discussed, including implicit fitness sharing, semantic GP, co-solvability, trace convergence analysis, pattern-guided program synthesis, and behavioral archives of subprograms. The framework involves several concepts that are new to GP, including execution record, combined trace, and search driver, a generalization of objective function. Empirical evidence gathered in several presented experiments clearly demonstrates the usefulness of behavioral approach. The book contains also an extensive discussion of implications of the behavioral perspective for program synthesis and beyond.

These contributions, written by the foremost international researchers and practitioners of Genetic Programming (GP), explore the synergy between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP. Topics in this volume include: multi-objective genetic programming, learning heuristics, Kaizen programming, Evolution of Everything (EvE), lexicase selection, behavioral program synthesis, symbolic regression with noisy training data, graph databases, and multidimensional clustering. It also covers several chapters on best practices and lesson learned from hands-on experience. Additional application areas include financial operations, genetic analysis, and predicting product choice. Readers will discover large-scale, real-world applications of GP to a variety of problem domains via in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant results.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2023, held as part of EvoStar 2023, in Brno, Czech Republic, during April 12–14, 2023, and co-located with the EvoStar events, EvoCOP, EvoMUSART, and EvoApplications. The 14 revised full papers and 8 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The wide range of topics in this volume reflects the current state of research in the field. The collection of papers cover topics including developing new variants of GP algorithms for both optimization and machine learning problems as well as exploring GP to address complex real-world problems.

These contributions, written by the foremost international researchers and practitioners of Genetic Programming (GP), explore the synergy between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP. Chapters in this volume include: Similarity-based Analysis of Population Dynamics in GP Performing Symbolic Regression Hybrid Structural and Behavioral Diversity Methods in GP Multi-Population Competitive Coevolution for Anticipation of Tax Evasion Evolving Artificial General Intelligence for Video Game Controllers A Detailed Analysis of a PushGP Run Linear Genomes for Structured Programs Neutrality, Robustness, and Evolvability in GP Local Search in GP PRETSL: Distributed Probabilistic Rule Evolution for Time-Series Classification Relational Structure in Program Synthesis Problems with Analogical Reasoning An Evolutionary Algorithm for Big Data Multi-Class Classification Problems A Generic Framework for Building Dispersion Operators in the Semantic Space Assisting Asset Model Development with Evolutionary Augmentation Building Blocks of Machine Learning Pipelines for Initialization of a Data Science Automation Tool Readers will discover large-scale, real-world applications of GP to a variety of problem domains via in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant results.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2022, held as part of Evo*2021, as Virtual Event, in April 2022, co-located with the Evo*2022 events, EvoCOP, EvoMUSART, and EvoApplications. The 12 revised full papers and 7 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The wide range of topics in this volume reflects the current state of research in the field. The collection of papers cover topics including developing new operators for variants of GP algorithms, as well as exploring GP applications to the optimization of machine learning methods and the evolution of complex combinational logic circuits.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2020, held as part of Evo*2020, in Seville, Spain, in April 2020, co-located with the Evo*2020 events EvoCOP, EvoMUSART and EvoApplications. The 12 full papers and 6 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. The papers cover a wide spectrum of topics, including designing GP algorithms for ensemble learning, comparing GP with popular machine learning algorithms, customising GP algorithms for more explainable AI applications to real-world problems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2019, held as part of Evo* 2019, in Leipzig, Germany, in April 2019, co-located with the Evo* events EvoCOP, EvoMUSART, and EvoApplications. The 12 revised full papers and 6 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. They cover a wide range of topics and reflect the current state of research in the field. With a special focus on real-world applications in 2019, the papers are devoted to topics such as the test data design in software engineering, fault detection and classification of induction motors, digital circuit design, mosquito abundance prediction, machine learning and cryptographic function design.

These contributions, written by the foremost international researchers and practitioners of Genetic Programming (GP), explore the synergy between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP. Topics in this volume include: exploiting subprograms in genetic programming, schema frequencies in GP, Accessible AI, GP for Big Data, lexicase selection, symbolic regression techniques, co-evolution of GP and LCS, and applying ecological principles to GP. It also covers several chapters on best practices and lessons learned from hands-on experience. Readers will discover large-scale, real-world applications of GP to a variety of problem domains via in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant results.