William B. Langdon

NE
5papers
21citations
Novelty23%
AI Score19

5 Papers

NEApr 4, 2022
Failed Disruption Propagation in Integer Genetic Programming

William B. Langdon

We inject a random value into the evaluation of highly evolved deep integer GP trees 9743720 times and find 99.7percent Suggesting crossover and mutation's impact are dissipated and seldom propagate outside the program. Indeed only errors near the root node have impact and disruption falls exponentially with depth at between exp(-depth/3) and exp(-depth/5) for recursive Fibonacci GP trees, allowing five to seven levels of nesting between the runtime perturbation and an optimal test oracle for it to detect most errors. Information theory explains this locally flat fitness landscape is due to FDP. Overflow is not important and instead, integer GP, like deep symbolic regression floating point GP and software in general, is not fragile, is robust, is not chaotic and suffers little from Lorenz' butterfly. Keywords: genetic algorithms, genetic programming, SBSE, information loss, information funnels, entropy, evolvability, mutational robustness, optimal test oracle placement, neutral networks, software robustness, correctness attraction, diversity, software testing, theory of bloat, introns

CVJul 20, 2024
GreenStableYolo: Optimizing Inference Time and Image Quality of Text-to-Image Generation

Jingzhi Gong, Sisi Li, Giordano d'Aloisio et al.

Tuning the parameters and prompts for improving AI-based text-to-image generation has remained a substantial yet unaddressed challenge. Hence we introduce GreenStableYolo, which improves the parameters and prompts for Stable Diffusion to both reduce GPU inference time and increase image generation quality using NSGA-II and Yolo. Our experiments show that despite a relatively slight trade-off (18%) in image quality compared to StableYolo (which only considers image quality), GreenStableYolo achieves a substantial reduction in inference time (266% less) and a 526% higher hypervolume, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art for text-to-image generation.

SEJul 31, 2020
Genetic Improvement @ ICSE 2020

William B. Langdon, Westley Weimer, Justyna Petke et al.

Following Prof. Mark Harman of Facebook's keynote and formal presentations (which are recorded in the proceedings) there was a wide ranging discussion at the eighth international Genetic Improvement workshop, GI-2020 @ ICSE (held as part of the 42nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering on Friday 3rd July 2020). Topics included industry take up, human factors, explainabiloity (explainability, justifyability, exploitability) and GI benchmarks. We also contrast various recent online approaches (e.g. SBST 2020) to holding virtual computer science conferences and workshops via the WWW on the Internet without face-2-face interaction. Finally we speculate on how the Coronavirus Covid-19 Pandemic will affect research next year and into the future.

DSJan 13, 2020
Fast Generation of Big Random Binary Trees

William B. Langdon

random_tree() is a linear time and space C++ implementation able to create trees of up to a billion nodes for genetic programming and genetic improvement experiments. A 3.60GHz CPU can generate more than 18 million random nodes for GP program trees per second.

NEJun 27, 2019
The State and Future of Genetic Improvement

William B. Langdon, Westley Weimer, Christopher Timperley et al.

We report the discussion session at the sixth international Genetic Improvement workshop, GI-2019 @ ICSE, which was held as part of the 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering on Tuesday 28th May 2019. Topics included GI representations, the maintainability of evolved code, automated software testing, future areas of GI research, such as co-evolution, and existing GI tools and benchmarks.