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Theory of evolutionary computation (EC) aims at providing mathematically founded statements about the performance of evolutionary algorithms (EAs). The predominant topic in this research domain is runtime analysis, which studies the time it…
Foundation models trained on web-scale data have revolutionized robotics, but their application to low-level control remains largely limited to behavioral cloning. Drawing inspiration from the success of the reinforcement learning stage in…
Evolutionary algorithms have been widely studied from a theoretical perspective. In particular, the area of runtime analysis has contributed significantly to a theoretical understanding and provided insights into the working behaviour of…
Developing autonomous home robots controlled by natural language has long been a pursuit of humanity. While advancements in large language models (LLMs) and embodied intelligence make this goal closer, several challenges persist: the lack…
While the theoretical analysis of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) has made significant progress for pseudo-Boolean optimization problems in the last 25 years, only sporadic theoretical results exist on how EAs solve permutation-based…
In this review we introduce the framework of reality-assisted evolution to summarize a growing trend towards combining model-based and model-free approaches to improve the design of physically embodied soft robots. In silico, data-driven…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic manipulation, leveraging large-scale pre-training to achieve strong performance. The field has rapidly evolved with additional spatial…
Modeling generalized robot control policies poses ongoing challenges for language-guided robot manipulation tasks. Existing methods often struggle to efficiently utilize cross-dataset resources or rely on resource-intensive vision-language…
We discuss a new optimization strategy, which considerably improves the effectivity of evolutionary algorithms applied to a certain class of optimization problems. The basic principle is to solve first a simpler related problem, which is…
Different subsystems of organisms adapt over many time scales, such as rapid changes in the nervous system (learning), slower morphological and neurological change over the lifetime of the organism (postnatal development), and change over…
One popular assumption regarding biological systems is that traits have evolved to be optimized with respect to function. This is a standard goal in evolutionary computation, and while not always embraced in the biological sciences, is an…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are a kind of nature-inspired general-purpose optimization algorithm, and have shown empirically good performance in solving various real-word optimization problems. During the past two decades, promising…
Imitation learning has demonstrated impressive results in robotic manipulation but fails under out-of-distribution (OOD) states. This limitation is particularly critical in Deformable Object Manipulation (DOM), where the near-infinite…
Genetic programming (GP) is an evolutionary computation technique to solve problems in an automated, domain-independent way. Rather than identifying the optimum of a function as in more traditional evolutionary optimization, the aim of GP…
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…
Neural networks, specifically deep convolutional neural networks, have achieved unprecedented performance in various computer vision tasks, but the rationale for the computations and structures of successful neural networks is not fully…
A key property underlying the success of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) is their global search behavior, which allows the algorithms to `jump' from a current state to other parts of the search space, thereby avoiding to get stuck in local…
Population-based evolutionary algorithms are often considered when approaching computationally expensive black-box optimization problems. They employ a selection mechanism to choose the best solutions from a given population after comparing…
One of the challenges of full autonomy is to have a robot capable of manipulating its current environment to achieve another environment configuration. This paper is a step towards this challenge, focusing on the visual understanding of the…
Many of today's robot perception systems aim at accomplishing perception tasks that are too simplistic and too hard. They are too simplistic because they do not require the perception systems to provide all the information needed to…