Xin Yao's Research Interests: Co-evolution

The most prominent characteristic of co-evolution is that the fitness of an individual depends on fitness of other individuals, which can be from the same population or a different population. Co-evolution can be used in both learning and optimisation although my own research has mainly been in learning. I am particularly interested in (1) the generalisation issue in co-evolutionary learning, (2) how to encourage "arms race" in co-evolution, (3) interactions/combinations between co-evolution and fitness sharing for automatic modularisation, and (4) how fitness landscapes (for different individuals) change and interact dynamically in co-evolution.

I have used the iterated prisoner's dilemma as an example in the study of co-evolutionary learning although neural networks were also used. I am collaborating with Dr Paul Darwen (Australia), Dr Sung-Bae Cho and Mr Yeon-Gyu Seo (South Korea) in this area. Part of my work was supported by the Australian Research Council.

Selected Papers

1. P. Darwen and X. Yao, ``Co-Evolution in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with Intermediate Levels of Cooperation: Application to Missile Defense,'' International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Applications, 2(1):83-107, 2002.
   Available from World Scientific's web site as a PDF file.

2. P. J. Darwen and X. Yao, ``Why More Choices Cause Less Cooperation in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma,'' Proceedings of the 2001 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, pp.987-994, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, May 2001.
   Available as a PDF file.

3. Y.-G. Seo, S.-B. Cho and X. Yao, ``The Impact of Payoff Function and Local Interaction on the N-player Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma,'' Knowledge and Information Systems: An International Journal. 2(4):461-478, November 2000.
   Available as w297.ps.gz.

4. P. J. Darwen and X. Yao, ``Does extra genetic diversity maintain escalation in a co-evolutionary arms race,'' International Journal of Knowledge-Based Intelligent Engineering Systems, 4(3):191-200, July 2000.
   Available as ausjap_journal.ps.gz.

5. Y.-G. Seo, S.-B. Cho and X. Yao, ``Exploiting Cooperative Coalition in Co-Evolutionary Learning,'' Proceedings of the 2000 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2000. pp.1268-1275.

6. X. Yao and P. J. Darwen, ``How Important Is Your Reputation in a Multi-Agent Environment,'' Proc. of the 1999 IEEE Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, pp.II-575 - II-580, October 1999.
   Available as yao_darwen_smc99.ps.gz.

7. Y.-G. Seo, S.-B. Cho and X. Yao, ``Emergence of Cooperative Coalition in NIPD game with Localization of Interaction and Learning,'' Proc. of the 1999 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 2, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, pp.877-884, July 1999.

8. P. J. Darwen and X. Yao, ``Speciation as automatic categorical modularization,'' IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 1(2):101-108, 1997.
   Available as darwen_yao_tec.ps.gz.

9. X. Yao, ``Automatic acquisition of strategies by co-evolutionary learning,'' Proc. of the International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Multimedia Applications (ICCIMA'97), Gold Coast, Australia, 10-12 February 1997, pp.23-29.
   Available as yao_iccima97.ps.gz.

10. X. Yao, Y. Liu and P. Darwen, ``How to make best use of evolutionary learning,'' Complexity International: An Electronic Journal of Complex Systems Research (ISSN 1320-0682), Vol. 3, July 1996.
    Also appeared in paper form in Complex Systems --- From Local Interactions to Global Phenomena, IOS Press, Amsterdam, pp.229--242, 1996.
    Available as yao_liu_darwen_cs96.ps.gz.

11. P. Darwen and X. Yao (1996a), ``Automatic modularisation by speciation,'' Proc. of the Third IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation (ICEC'96), Nagoya, Japan, 20-22 May 1996, pp.88-93.
    (Available as darwen_yao_icec96.ps.Z).

12. P. Darwen and X. Yao (1996b), ``Every niching method has its niche: fitness sharing and implicit sharing compared,'' Proc. of Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN) IV, Vol.1141, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp.398-407, 1996.
    (Available as darwen_yao_compare.ps.Z).

13. P. Darwen and X. Yao (1995a), ``A dilemma for fitness sharing with a scaling function,'' Proc. of 1995 IEEE Conference on Evolutionary Computation (ICEC'95), Perth, Australia, IEEE Press, pp.166-171.
    (Available as icec95.ps.Z).

14. P. Darwen and X. Yao (1995b), ``On evolving robust strategies for iterated prisoner's dilemma,'' In Progress in Evolutionary Computation, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 956, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, pp.276-292.
    (Available as ai93_ipd.ps.Z).

15. X. Yao and Y. Shi (1995), ``A Preliminary Study on Designing Artificial Neural Networks Using Co-Evolution,'' Invited paper, Proc. of IEEE Singapore International Conference on Intelligent Control and Instrumentation (SICICI'95), pp.149-154, IEEE Singapore Section.
    (Available as sicici95.ps.Z).

Last update: 5 September 2000