Michal Pluháček

Michal Pluhacek, Simon Garnier, Andreagiovanni Reina

Collective intelligence and autonomy of robot swarms can be improved by enabling the individual robots to become aware they are the constituent units of a larger whole and what is their role. In this study, we present an algorithm to enable positional self-awareness in a swarm of minimalistic error-prone robots which can only locally broadcast messages and estimate the distance from their neighbours. Despite being unable to measure the bearing of incoming messages, the robots running our algorithm can calculate their position within a swarm deployed in a regular formation. We show through experiments with up to 200 Kilobot robots that such positional self-awareness can be employed by the robots to create a shared coordinate system and dynamically self-assign location-dependent tasks. Our solution has fewer requirements than state-of-the-art algorithms and contains collective noise-filtering mechanisms. Therefore, it has an extended range of robotic platforms on which it can run. All robots are interchangeable, run the same code, and do not need any prior knowledge. Through our algorithm, robots reach collective synchronisation, and can autonomously become self-aware of the swarm's spatial configuration and their position within it.

Adam Viktorin, Tomas Kadavy, Jozef Kovac et al.

This paper presents EASE (Effortless Algorithmic Solution Evolution), an open-source and fully modular framework for iterative algorithmic solution generation leveraging large language models (LLMs). EASE integrates generation, testing, analysis, and evaluation into a reproducible feedback loop, giving users full control over error handling, analysis, and quality assessment. Its architecture supports the orchestration of multiple LLMs in complementary roles-such as generator, analyst, and evaluator. By abstracting the complexity of prompt design and model management, EASE provides a transparent and extensible platform for researchers and practitioners to co-design algorithms and other generative solutions across diverse domains.

Ana Nikolikj, Michal Pluháček, Carola Doerr et al.

Leave-one-problem-out (LOPO) performance prediction requires machine learning (ML) models to extrapolate algorithms' performance from a set of training problems to a previously unseen problem. LOPO is a very challenging task even for state-of-the-art approaches. Models that work well in the easier leave-one-instance-out scenario often fail to generalize well to the LOPO setting. To address the LOPO problem, recent work suggested enriching standard random forest (RF) performance regression models with a weighted average of algorithms' performance on training problems that are considered similar to a test problem. More precisely, in this RF+clust approach, the weights are chosen proportionally to the distances of the problems in some feature space. Here in this work, we extend the RF+clust approach by adjusting the distance-based weights with the importance of the features for performance regression. That is, instead of considering cosine distance in the feature space, we consider a weighted distance measure, with weights depending on the relevance of the feature for the regression model. Our empirical evaluation of the modified RF+clust approach on the CEC 2014 benchmark suite confirms its advantages over the naive distance measure. However, we also observe room for improvement, in particular with respect to more expressive feature portfolios.