Publications

2024

LayerShuffle: Enhancing Robustness in Vision Transformers by Randomizing Layer Execution Order
Matthias Freiberger, Peter Kun, Anders Sundnes Løvlie, Sebastian Risi
arXiv preprint.

From Text to Life: On the Reciprocal Relationship between Artificial Life and Large Language Models
Eleni Nisioti, Claire Glanois, Elias Najarro, Andrew Dai, Elliot Meyerson, Joachim Winther Pedersen, Laetitia Teodorescu, Conor F. Hayes, Shyam Sudhakaran, Sebastian Risi († contributed equally)
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2024).

Evolving Self-Assembling Neural Networks: From Spontaneous Activity to Experience-Dependent Learning
Erwan Plantec, Joachim W. Pedersen, Milton L. Montero, Eleni Nisioti, and Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2024)

Meta-Learning an Evolvable Developmental Encoding
Milton L. Montero, Erwan Plantec, Eleni Nisioti, Joachim W. Pedersen, and Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2024)

Collective Innovation in Groups of Large Language Models
Eleni Nisioti, Sebastian Risi, Ida Momennejad, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, and Clément Moulin-Frier
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2024)

Evolutionary Implications of Multi-Scale Intelligence
Benedikt Hartl, Sebastian Lins Risi, and Michael Levin
preprint

Structurally Flexible Neural Networks: Evolving the Building Blocks for General Agents
Joachim Winther Pedersen, Erwan Plantec, Eleni Nisioti, Milton Montero, Sebastian Risi
In Proceedings of Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO), 2024.

Growing Artificial Neural Networks for Control: the Role of Neuronal Diversity
Eleni Nisioti, Erwan Plantec, Milton Montero, Joachim Winther Pedersen, Sebastian Risi
In Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, 2024.

AI Art Perceptions with GenFrame – an Image Generating Picture Frame
Peter Kun, Matthias Freiberger Anders Løvlie, and Sebastian Risi
Design Research Society (DRS 2024)

Algorithmic Ways of Seeing: Using Object Detection to Facilitate Art Exploration
Louie Meyer, Johanne Engel Aaen, Anitamalina Regitse Tranberg, Peter Kun, Matthias Freiberger,  Sebastian Risi, Anders Løvlie
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI-2024)

CLIPMasterPrints: Fooling Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Using Latent Variable Evolution
Matthias Freiberger, Peter Kun, Christian Igel, Anders Sundnes Løvlie, Sebastian Risi
arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.03798
To appear: Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

2023

Towards Self-Assembling Artificial Neural Networks through Neural Developmental Programs
Elias Najarro, Shyam Sudhakaran and Sebastian Risi
To appear: The 2023 Conference on Artificial Life

Open-Ended Library Learning in Unsupervised Program Synthesis
Claire Glanois, Shyam Sudhakaran, Elias Najarro and Sebastian Risi
To appear: The 2023 Conference on Artificial Life

A Platform for Casual Co-Creation with Purpose, Envisioning the Future through Human-AI Collaboration with Multiple Stakeholders
Janet Rafner, Blanka Zana, Tristan Beolet, Safinaz Büyükgüzel, Neil Maiden, Ewen Michel, Sebastian Risi and Jacob Sherson
To appear:  14th International Conference on Computational Creativity, ICCC’23. 

Evolution of an Internal Reward Function for Reinforcement Learning
Zuo, Weiyi, Joachim Pedersen, and Sebastian Risi.
In Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, pp. 351-354. 2023.

A Fully-distributed Shape-aware Neural Controller for Modular Robots
Giorgia Nadizar, Eric Medvet, Kathryn Walker, Sebastian Risi
To appear: Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 20223). New York, NY: ACM.

Learning to Act through Evolution of Neural Diversity in Random Neural Networks
Joachim Winther Pedersen, Sebastian Risi
To appear: Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 20223). New York, NY: ACM.

MarioGPT: Open-Ended Text2Level Generation through Large Language Models [code]
Shyam Sudhakaran, Miguel González-Duque, Claire Glanois, Matthias Freiberger, Elias Najarro, Sebastian Risi
Thirty-seventh Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)

2022

Skill Decision Transformer
Shyam Sudhakaran and Sebastian Risi
Workshop on Foundation Models for Decision Making – NeurIPS 2022

Mario Plays on a Manifold: Generating Functional Content in Latent Space through Differential Geometry
Miguel González-Duque, Rasmus Berg Palm, Søren Hauberg, Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the Conference on Games (CoG 2022)

Severe Damage Recovery in Evolving Soft Robots through Differentiable Programming
Kazuya Horibe, Kathryn Walker, Rasmus Berg Palm, Shyam Sudhakaran, Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines journal.

Goal-Guided Neural Cellular Automata: Learning to Control Self-Organising Systems
Shyam Sudhakaran, Elias Najarro, Sebastian Risi
From Cells to Societies: Collective Learning across Scales 2022 ICLR Workshop

HyperNCA: Growing Developmental Networks with Neural Cellular Automata
Elias Najarro, Shyam Sudhakaran, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
From Cells to Societies: Collective Learning across Scales 2022 ICLR Workshop

Biological underpinnings for lifelong learning machines
D. Kudithipudi, M. Aguilar-Simon, …., J. Babb, S. Risi, and many others
Nature Machine Intelligence 4, 196–210 (2022).

Minimal Neural Network Models for Permutation Invariant Agents
Joachim Winther Pedersen and Sebastian Risi
To appear: Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2022). New York, NY: ACM

Physical Neural Cellular Automata for 2D Shape Classification
Kathryn Walker, Rasmus Berg Palm, Rodrigo Moreno Garcia, Andres Faina, Kasper Stoy, Sebastian Risi
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022)

A Unified Substrate for Body-Brain Co-evolution
Sidney Pontes-Filho, Kathryn Walker, Elias Najarro, Stefano Nichele, Sebastian Risi
From Cells to Societies: Collective Learning across Scales 2022 ICLR Workshop

Variational Neural Cellular Automata
Rasmus Berg Palm, Miguel González Duque, Shyam Sudhakaran, and Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2022)

Towards A Framework for Human-AI Interaction Patterns in Co-Creative GAN Applications
Imke Grabe, Miguel González-Duque, Sebastian Risi and Jichen Zhu
Workshop on Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models (HAI-GEN 2022)

2021

Hybrid Encoding For Generating Large Scale Game Level Patterns With Local Variations Using a GAN
Jacob Schrum, Benjamin Capps, Kirby Steckel, Vanessa Volz, Sebastian Risi
IEEE Transactions on Games, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 46-55, March 2023.

Fast Game Content Adaptation Through Bayesian-based Player Modelling
Miguel González-Duque, Rasmus Berg Palm, Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the Conference on Games (CoG 2021)

CREA.blender: a casual creator for creativity assessment
Miroslav Gajdacz, Janet Rafner, Steven Langsford, Arthur Hjorth, Carsten Bergenholtz, Michael Mose Biskjaer, Lior Noy, Sebastian Risi, and Jacob Sherson
Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 2021)

Safer Reinforcement Learning through Transferable Instinct Networks
Djordje Grbic and Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2021)

Utopian or Dystopian?: using a ML-assisted image generation game to empower the general public to envision the future
Janet Rafner, Stevan Langsford, Arthur Hjorth, Miroslav Gajdacz, Lotte Philipsen, Sebastian Risi, Joel Simon,  Jacob Sherson
Conference on Creativity & Cognition 2021, ACM

Rapid Risk Minimization with Bayesian Models Through Deep Learning Approximation
Mathias Löwe, Per Lunnemann Hansen and Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2021)

Improving Object Detection in Art Images Using Only Style Transfer
David Kadish, Sebastian Risi and Anders Sundnes Lovlie
Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2021)

Dealing with Adversarial Player Strategies in the Neural Network Game iNNk through Ensemble Learning
Mathias Löwe, Jennifer Villareale, Evan Freed, Aleksanteri Sladek, Jichen Zhu, Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the Foundations of Digital Games Conference (FDG 2021).
Winner of a Best Paper Award.

Squeezer – A Mixed-Initiative Tool for Designing Juice Effects
Mads Johansen, Martin Pichlmair and Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the Foundations of Digital Games Conference (FDG 2021).

Growing Simulated Robots with Environmental Feedback: an Eco-Evo-Devo Approach
Kathryn Walker, Helmut Hauser, Sebastian Risi
Companion to the Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO Companion 2021). New York, NY: ACM (2 pages).

Evolving and Merging Hebbian Learning Rules: Increasing Generalization by Decreasing the Number of Rules
Joachim Winther Pedersen and Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2021). New York, NY: ACM.

Growing 3D Artefacts and Functional Machines with Neural Cellular Automata
Shyam Sudhakaran, Djordje Grbic, Siyan Li, Adam Katona, Elias Najarro, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2021)

Regenerating Soft Robots through Neural Cellular Automata
Kazuya Horibe, Kathryn Walker and Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the 24th European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2021)

Player-AI Interaction: What Neural Network Games Reveal About AI as Play
Jichen Zhu, Jennifer Villareale, Nithesh Javvaji, Sebastian Risi, Mathias Löwe, Rush Weigelt, Casper Harteveld
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI-2021)

Deep Innovation Protection: Confronting the Credit Assignment Problem in Training Heterogeneous Neural Architectures 
Sebastian Risi and Kenneth O. Stanley
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fith AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2021)

Evolutionary Planning in Latent Space
Thor V.A.N. Olesen, Dennis T.T. Nguyen, Rasmus Berg Palm, Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2021)

EvoCraft: A New Challenge for Open-Endedness
Djordje Grbic, Rasmus Berg Palm, Elias Najarro, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2021)

2020

Testing the Genomic Bottleneck Hypothesis in Hebbian Meta-Learning
Rasmus Berg Palm, Elias Najarro, Sebastian Risi
2020
Preregistration Workshop on Machine Learning at NeurIPS 2020

Adapting to a changing environment: Simulating the effects of noise on animal sonification
David Kadish and Sebastian Risi
Artificial Life Conference Proceedings. MIT Press, 2020.

Meta-Learning through Hebbian Plasticity in Random Networks
Elias Najarro and Sebastian Risi
Thirty-fourth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020)

Increasing generality in machine learning through procedural content generation [arXiv preprint]
Sebastian Risi and Julian Togelius
In: Nature Machine Intelligence, 2, 428–436, 2020.

Squeezer – A Tool for Designing Juicy Effects
Mads Johansen, Martin Pichlmair, Sebastian Risi
In: CHI PLAY 2020 Work-In-Progress

Evolving Hypernetworks for Game-playing Agents
Christian Carvelli, Djordje Grbic, Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (GECCO 2020)

crea.blender: A neural network-based image generation game to assess creative potential
Janet Rafner, Arthur Hjorth, Sebastian Risi, Lotte Philipsen, Charles Dumas, Michael Mose Biskjær, Lior Noy, Kristian Tylén, Carsten Bergenholtz, Jesse Lynch, Blanka Zana, Jacob Sherson
In: CHI PLAY 2020 Work-In-Progress

iNNk: A Multi-Player Game to Deceive a Neural Network
Jennifer Villareale, Ana Acosta-Ruiz, Samuel Arcaro, Thomas Fox, Evan Freed, Robert Gray, Mathias Löwe, Panote Nuchprayoon, Aleksanteri Sladek, Rush Weigelt, Yifu Li, Sebastian Risi, Jichen Zhu
In: CHI PLAY 2020 Work-In-Progress

Deep Learning for Procedural Content Generation
Jialin Liu, Sam Snodgrass, Ahmed Khalifa, Sebastian Risi, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius
Accepted to appear in: Neural Computing and Applications journal.

Finding Game Levels with the Right Difficulty in a Few Trials through Intelligent Trial-and-Error
Miguel Gonzalez-Duque, Rasmus Berg Palm, David Ha, Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2020

Capturing Local and Global Patterns in Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning
Vanessa Volz, Niels Justesen, Sam Snodgrass, Sahar Asadi, Sami Purmonen, Christoffer Holmgård, Julian Togelius, Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2020

Safe Reinforcement Learning through Meta-learned Instincts
Djordje Grbic, Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Artificial Life, MIT Press

Learning a Behavioral Repertoire from Demonstrations
Niels Justesen, Miguel Gonzalez Duque, Daniel Cabarcas Jaramillo, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2020

Bootstrapping Conditional GANs for Video Game Level Generation
Ruben Rodriguez Torrado, Ahmed Khalifa, Michael Cerny Green, Niels Justesen, Sebastian Risi, Julian Togelius
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2020

CPPN2GAN: Combining CPPNs and GANs for Large-scale Pattern Generation
Jacob Schrum, Vanessa Volz, Sebastian Risi
Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2020). New York, NY: ACM.

Interactive Evolution and Exploration Within Latent Level-Design Space of Generative Adversarial Networks
Jacob Schrum, Jake Gutierrez, Vanessa Volz, Jialin Liu, Simon Lucas, Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2020). New York, NY: ACM.

From Chess and Atari to StarCraft and Beyond: How Game AI is Driving the World of AI
Sebastian Risi and Mike Preuss
In: KI – Künstliche Intelligenz journal

CG-GAN: An Interactive Evolutionary GAN-based Approach for Facial Composite Generation
Nicola Zaltron, Luisa Zurlo, Sebastian Risi
To appear in:
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2020).

Revealing Neural Network Bias to Non-Experts Through Interactive Counterfactual Examples
Chelsea M. Myers, Evan Freed, Luis Fernando Laris Pardo, Anushay Furqan, Sebastian Risi, Jichen Zhu
In preprint: arXiv:2001.02271 [cs.HC]

2019

Blood Bowl: A New Board Game Challenge and Competition for AI
Niels Justesen, Lasse Uth, Christopher Jakobsen, Peter Moore, Julian Togelius and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2019

Video Game Description Language Environment for Unity Machine Learning Agents
Mads Johansen, Martin Pichlmair and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2019

When Are We Done with Games?
Niels Justesen, Michael S. Debus and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2019

Deep Neuroevolution of Recurrent and Discrete World Models
Sebastian Risi and Kenneth Stanley
To appear in: Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2019). New York, NY: ACM. (code)

An Artificial Life Approach to Studying Niche Differentiation in Soundscape Ecology
David Kadish, Sebastian Risi and Laura Beloff
To appear in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Artificial Life. (This manuscript is slightly amended from the published version to correct an error in Figure 3.)

MAP-Elites for Noisy Domains by Adaptive Sampling
Niels Justesen, Sebastian Risi, and Jean-Baptiste Mouret
To appear in:  Companion to the Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO Companion 2019). New York, NY: ACM (2 pages).

Towards Continual Reinforcement Learning through Evolutionary Meta-Learning
Djordje Grbic and Sebastian Risi
To appear in:  Companion to the Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO Companion 2019). New York, NY: ACM (2 pages).

Death and Progress: How Evolvability is Influenced by Intrinsic Mortality
Frank Veenstra, Pablo González de Prado Salas, Josh Bongard, Kasper Støy and Sebastian Risi
To appear: Artificial Life Journal – Special Issue ALIFE 2018

Deep Learning for Video Game Playing
Niels Justesen, Philip Bontrager, Julian Togelius, Sebastian Risi
In: IEEE Transactions on Games journal

2018

Born to Learn: the Inspiration, Progress, and Future of Evolved Plastic Artificial Neural Networks
Andrea Soltoggio, Kenneth O. Stanley, Sebastian Risi
In: Neural Networks journal. Volume 108, 2018, Pages 48-67.

Illuminating Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning through Procedural Level Generation
Niels Justesen, Ruben Rodriguez Torrado, Philip Bontrager, Ahmed Khalifa, Julian Togelius, Sebastian Risi
To appear in: NeurIPS 2018 Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Evolving in-game mood-expressive music with MetaCompose
Marco Scirea, Peter Eklund, Julian Togelius, and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of Audio Mostly (AM 2018)
Winner of a best paper award.

Blood Bowl: The Next Board Game Challenge for AI
Niels Justesen, Sebastian Risi, Julian Togelius
To appear in: FDG workshop on Tabletop Games, 2018 (2 pages).

Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation
Jichen Zhu, Antonios Liapis, Sebastian Risi, Rafael Bidarra and Michael Youngblood
To appear: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2018).

Intrinsic Mortality Governs Evolvability
Frank Veenstra, Pablo González de Prado Salas, Josh Bongard, Kasper Støy and Sebastian Risi
In: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Artificial Life.
Winner of the best student paper award.

Automated Curriculum Learning by Rewarding Temporally Rare Events
Niels Justesen and Sebastian Risi
To appear: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2018).

A Robot to Shape your Natural Plant: The Machine Learning Approach to Model and Control Bio-Hybrid Systems
Mostafa Wahby, Mary Katherine Heinrich, Daniel Nicolas Hofstadler, Payam Zahadat, Sebastian Risi, Phil Ayres, Thomas Schmickl, Heiko Hamann
To appear in: Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2018). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).

Evolution of Fin Undulation on a Physical Knifefish-inspired Soft Robot
Frank Veenstra, Jonas Jørgensen, Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2018). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).

Collaborative Interactive Evolution in Minecraft
Pablo González de Prado Salas and Sebastian Risi
To appear in:  Companion to the Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO Companion 2018). New York, NY: ACM (2 pages).

Towards an experiment on perception of affective music generation using MetaCompose
Marco Scirea, Peter Eklund, Julian Togelius, and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Companion to the Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO Companion 2018). New York, NY: ACM (2 pages).

Evolving Mario Levels in the Latent Space of a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network
Vanessa Volz, Jacob Schrum,  Jialin Liu, Simon M. Lucas, Adam M. Smith, Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2018). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).
Winner of a best paper award. 

HyperNTM: Evolving Scalable Neural Turing Machines through HyperNEAT
Jakob Merrild and Mikkel Angaju Rasmussen and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the 21th European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2018)

Deep Interactive Evolution
Philip Bontrager, Wending Lin, Julian Togelius and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMusArt 2018).

2017

Towards a Plant Bio-Machine
Stefano Nichele, Sebastian Risi, Gunnar Tufte and Laura Beloff
To appear: 2017 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI 2017)

Deep Learning for Video Game Playing
Niels Justesen, Philip Bontrager, Julian Togelius, Sebastian Risi
In arXiv preprint: arXiv:1708.07902 [cs.AI]

Towards Energy Autonomy in Heterogeneous Modular Plant-Inspired Robots through Artificial Evolution
Frank Veenstra, Chloe Metayer, Sebastian Risi, Kasper Stoy
Accepted to appear: Frontiers in Robotics and AI, section Bionics and Biomimetics, 2017.

flora robotica – An Architectural System Combining Living Natural Plants and Distributed Robots
Heiko Hamann, Mohammad Divband Soorati, Mary Katherine Heinrich, Daniel Nicolas Hofstadler, Igor Kuksin, Frank Veenstra, Mostafa Wahby, Stig Anton Nielsen,  Sebastian Risi, Tomasz Skrzypczak, Payam Zahadat, Przemyslaw Wojtaszek, Kasper Stoy, Thomas Schmickl, Serge Kernbach and Phil Ayres
To appear in: Living Architectures Workshop 2017, at the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) 2017.

Primal-Improv: Towards Co-Evolutionary Musical Improvisation
Marco Scirea, Julian Togelius, Peter Eklund, Sebastian Risi
Accepted to appear in: Proceedings of the 2017 9th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CEEC’17)
Nominated for a best paper award.

Playing Multi-Action Adversarial Games: Online Evolution vs. Tree Search
Niels Justesen, Tobias Mahlmann, Sebastian Risi and Julian Togelius (2017)
Accepted to appear in: IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (TCIAIG).

CA-NEAT: Evolved Compositional Pattern Producing Networks for Cellular Automata Morphogenesis and Replication
Stefano Nichele, Mathias Berild Ose, Sebastian Risi, Gunnar Tufte (2017)
Accepted to appear in: IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems.

Learning Macromanagement in StarCraft from Replays using Deep Learning
Niels Justesen and Sebastian Risi (2017)
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2017).

Affective Evolutionary Music Composition with MetaCompose
Marco Scirea, Julian Togelius, Peter Eklund and Sebastian Risi (2017)
To appear in: Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines.

1D Printing of  Recyclable Robots
Daniel Cellucci, Robert MacCurdy, Hod Lipson, Sebastian Risi (2017)
Accepted to appear in: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). IEEE link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7950924/

DLNE: A Hybridization of Deep Learning and Neuroevolution for Visual Control
Andreas Precht Poulsen, Mark Thorhauge, Mikkel Hvilshøj Funch and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2017).
Winner of the best paper award.

Can You Feel It? Evaluation of Affective Expression in Music Generated by MetaCompose
Marco~Scirea, Peter Eklund, Julian Togelius, and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2017). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).

Continual Online Evolutionary Planning for In-Game Build Order Adaptation in StarCraft
Niels Justesen and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2017). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).

Automating the Incremental Evolution of Controllers for Physical Robots
Andrés Faíña, Lars Toft Jacobsen, Sebastian Risi
Accepted to appear in: Artificial Life Special Issue on the Evolution of Physical Systems.

Evolution and Morphogenesis of Simulated Modular Robots: A Comparison Between a Direct and Generative Encoding
Frank Veenstra,  Andres Faina,  Sebastian Risi,  Kasper Stoy
To appear in: Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2017)

Interactive Evolution of Complex Behaviours through Skill Encapsulation
Pablo González de Prado Salas,  Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2017)

Continual and One-Shot Learning through Neural Networks with Dynamic External Memory
Benno Lüders,  Mikkel Schläger,  Aleksandra Korach, and  Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2017)

2016

Continual Learning through Evolvable Neural Turing Machines
Benno Lüders, Mikkel Schläger and Sebastian Risi
To appear In: Proceedings of the NIPS 2016 Workshop on Continual Learning and Deep Networks (CLDL 2016). Oral Presentation
Winner of the Best Paper Award

Download the Java source code here. C# port, which accompanyings this paper be be found here.

Breeding a Diversity of Super Mario Behaviors Through Interactive Evolution
Patrikk D. Sørensen, Jeppeh M. Olsen and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games
Source code available here

Artefacts: Minecraft meets Collaborative Interactive Evolution
Cristinel Patrascu and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games

Creative Generation of 3D Objects with Deep Learning and Innovation Engines
Joel Lehman, Sebastian Risi, and Jeff Clune
To appear in: The Seventh International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 2016).

WebAL Comes of Age:  A review of the first 21 years of Artificial Life on the Web
Tim Taylor, Joshua E. Auerbach, Josh Bongard, Jeff Clune, Simon Hickinbotham, Charles Ofria, Mizuki Oka, Sebastian Risi, Kenneth O. Stanley, Jason Yosinski
Accepted to appear in: Artificial Life journal.

Generating Artificial Phytomorphologies for Function and Aesthetics through Evolving L-Systems
Frank Veenstra, Andres Faina, Kasper Stoy and Sebastian Risi
Accepted to appear in: Proceedings of The Fifteenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALife XV)

Automatic Evolution of Multimodal Behavior with Multi-Brain HyperNEAT
Jacob Schrum, Joel Lehman, Sebastian Risi
Abstract to appear in: Companion to the Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO Companion 2016). New York, NY: ACM (2 pages).
More information and videos: http://people.southwestern.edu/~schrum2/re/mb-hyperneat.html

Interactive Super Mario Bros Evolution
Patrikk D. Sørensen, Jeppeh M. Olsen and Sebastian Risi
Abstract to appear in: Companion to the Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO Companion 2016). New York, NY: ACM (2 pages).
Conference (GECCO-2016). New York, NY: ACM (2 pages).

Accelerating the Evolution of Cognitive Behaviors Through Human-Computer Collaboration
Mathias Löwe and Sebastian Risi
Accepted to appear in: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2016). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).

Evolving Neural Turing Machines for Reward-based Learning
Rasmus Boll Greve, Emil Juul Jacobsen, and Sebastian Risi
Accepted to appear in: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2016). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).

EvoCommander: A Novel Game Based on Evolving and Switching Between Artificial Brains
Daniel Jallov, Sebastian Risi, Julian Togelius
Accepted to appear in:  IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (TCIAIG).

Towards Adaptive Evolutionary Architecture
Sebastian Bak,  Nina Rask,  Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMusArt), 2016.

MetaCompose: A Compositional Evolutionary Music Composer
Marco Scirea,  Julian Togelius,  Peter Eklund,  Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMusArt), 2016.
Winner of a best paper award

2015

Increasing Behavioral Complexity for Evolved Virtual Creatures with the ESP Method
Dan Lessin, Don Fussell, Risto Miikkulainen, Sebastian Risi
In: ArXiv e-prints. E-print no.arXiv:1510.07957. Submitted Oct 2015

Evolving Neural Turing Machines
Rasmus Boll Greve, Emil Juul Jacobsen, and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the NIPS 2015 Workshop on Reasoning, Attention, Memory (RAM) 

Neuroevolution in Games: State of the Art and Open Challenges
Sebastian Risi and Julian Togelius
To appear in: IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (TCIAIG), 2015.

Flora Robotica – Mixed Societies of Symbiotic Robot-Plant Bio-Hybrids
Heiko Hamann, Mostafa Wahby, Thomas Schmickl, Payam Zahadat, Daniel Hofstadler, Kasper Stoy, Sebastian Risi, Andres Faina, Frank Veenstra, Serge Kernbach, Igor Kuksin, Olga Kernbach, Phil Ayres and Przemyslaw Wojtaszek
To appear in: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life (IEEE ALIFE’15)

Investigating MCTS Modifications in General Video Game Playing
Frederik Frydenberg, Kasper Andersen, Sebastian Risi and Julian Togelius
To appear in: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games

Soft-Body Muscles for Evolved Virtual Creatures: The Next Step on a Bio-Mimetic Path to Meaningful Morphological Complexity
Dan Lessin and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2015)
Video: https://youtu.be/dSlHoIBDdlc

Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Simulated Car Racing
Jacob Fischer, Nikolaj Falsted, Mathias Vielwerth, Julian Togelius and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the Foundations of Digital Games Conference (FDG 2015)

Darwin’s Avatars: a Novel Combination of Gameplay and Procedural Content Generation
Dan Lessin and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2015). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).
Video: http://youtu.be/p42wPQ3FYLU

Interactively Evolving Compositional Sound Synthesis Networks
Björn Þór Jónsson, Amy Hoover, and Sebastian Risi
To appear in: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2015). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).

Petalz: Search-based Procedural Content Generation for the Casual Gamer
Sebastian Risi, Joel Lehman, David B. D’Ambrosio, Ryan Hall and Kenneth Stanley
In: IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (TCIAIG), 2015.

Interactive Evolution of Levels for a Competitive Multiplayer FPS
Peter Olsted, Benjamin Ma and Sebastian Risi
To appear In: Proceedings of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2015)

BrainCrafter: An Investigation Into Human-based Neural Network Engineering
Jan Piskur, Peter Greve, Julian Togelius and Sebastian Risi
To appear In: Proceedings of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2015)

DrawCompileEvolve: Sparking Interactive Evolutionary Art with Human Creations
Jinhong Zhang, Rasmus Taarnby, Antonios Liapis, and Sebastian Risi
In: Proceedings of Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMusArt), 2015.

2014

An Anarchy of Methods: Current Trends in How Intelligence Is Abstracted in AI
Joel Lehman, Jeff Clune, Sebastian Risi
In: IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2014

Neuroevolution in Games: State of the Art and Open Challenges
Sebastian Risi and Julian Togelius
In: ArXiv e-prints. E-print no. 1410.7326. Submitted Nov 2014
Note:  This arxiv paper is now superseded by the TCIAIG version by the same name (above).

The Case for a Mixed-Initiative Collaborative Neuroevolution Approach
Sebastian Risi, Jinhong Zhang, Rasmus Taarnby, Peter Greve, Jan Piskur, Antonios Liapis, Julian Togelius (2014). In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Artificial Life and the Web (WebAL-1) at the 14th International Conference on the Synthesis & Simulation of Living Systems (ALIFE-14).

Representations for Search-based Methods (invited book chapter)
Dan Ashlock, Sebastian Risi, Julian Togelius
To appear in: Procedural Content Generation in Games: A Textbook and an Overview of Current Research. Springer. 2014.

Script- and Cluster-based UCT for StarCraft
Niels Justesen, Balint Tillman, Julian Togelius, Sebastian Risi
In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG-2014). Piscataway, NJ:IEEE.

Guided Self-Organization in Indirectly Encoded and Evolving Topographic Maps
Sebastian Risi and Kenneth Stanley
To appear in: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2014). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).

Automatically Categorizing Procedurally Generated Content for Collecting Games
Sebastian Risi, Joel Lehman, David D’Ambrosio and Kenneth Stanley (2014)
To appear in:  Proceedings of the Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games (PCG) at the 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG-2014). New York, NY: ACM

2013

A Compiler for CPPNs: Transforming Phenotypic Descriptions Into Genotypic Representations
Sebastian Risi (2013)
In: 2013 AAAI Fall Symposium Series – How Should Intelligence be Abstracted in AI Research.

CPPNs Effectively Encode Fracture: A Response to Critical Factors in the Performance of HyperNEAT
Kenneth O. Stanley, Jeff Clune, David B. D’Ambrosio, Colin D. Green, Joel Lehman, Gregory Morse, Justin K. Pugh, Sebastian Risi, and Paul Szerlip
University of Central Florida Dept. of EECS Technical Report CS-TR-13-05

Encouraging Reactivity to Create Robust Machines
Joel Lehman, Sebastian Risi, David D’Ambrosio and Kenneth Stanley (2013)
In: Adaptive Behavior journal.

Ribosomal Robots: Evolved Designs Inspired by Protein Folding
Sebastian Risi, Daniel Cellucci, Hod Lipson (2013)
In: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2013). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).

Confronting the Challenge of Learning a Flexible Neural Controller for a Diversity of Morphologies
Sebastian Risi and Kenneth Stanley (2013)
In: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2013). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).
Note: Videos of this best evolved controller are available at: http://youtu.be/oLSSt5GyHNk

Single-Unit Pattern Generators for Quadruped Locomotion
Gregory Morse, Sebastian Risi, and Kenneth Stanley (2013)
In: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2013). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).

2012

Dissertation: Towards Evolving More Brain-like Artificial Neural Networks

An Enhanced Hypercube-Based Encoding for Evolving the Placement, Density, and Connectivity of Neurons
Sebastian Risi and Kenneth O. Stanley (2012)
In: Artifi cial Life journal.

Introducing a Marketplace for Evolved Content in the Petalz Social Video Game
Sebastian Risi, Joel Lehman, David D’Ambrosio, Ryan Hall and Kenneth Stanley (2012)
In: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual AAAI Conference on Arti cial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2012).

Multirobot Behavior Synchronization through Direct Neural Network Communication
David D’Ambrosio, Skyler Goodell, Joel Lehman, Sebastian Risi and Kenneth Stanley (2012)
In: Proceedings International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2012).
Note: This paper is accompanied with a set of video demos at http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/demos/hive-brain-patrol.

The Benefits of Divergent Search for Evolved Representations
Joel Lehman, Sebastian Risi and Kenneth Stanley (2012)
In: Proceedings of the Workshop of the Thirteen International Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE XIII). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rewarding Reactivity to Evolve Robust Controllers without Multiple Trials or Noise
Joel Lehman, Sebastian Risi, David D’Ambrosio and Kenneth Stanley (2012)
In: Proceedings of the Thirteen International Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE XIII). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

A Unified Approach to Evolving Plasticity and Neural Geometry
Sebastian Risi and Kenneth O. Stanley (2012)
In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN-2012). New York, NY: IEEE.
Winner of the Best Student Paper Award (out of 299 papers submitted with student first authors)

2011

Task Switching in Multiagent Learning through Indirect Encoding
David B. D’Ambrosio, Joel Lehman, Sebastian Risi, and Kenneth O. Stanley (2011)
In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011 San Fransisco, CA).

Enhancing ES-HyperNEAT to Evolve More Complex Regular Neural Networks
Sebastian Risi and Kenneth O. Stanley (2011)
In: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2011, Dublin, Ireland). New York, NY: ACM (8 pages).
Nominated for a Best Paper Award in the GDS Track at GECCO-2011

2010

Evolving Plastic Neural Networks with Novelty Search
Sebastian Risi, Charles E. Hughes, and Kenneth O. Stanley (2010)
In:  Adaptive Behavior journal, London: SAGE, 2010 (41 pages).

Indirectly Encoding Neural Plasticity as a Pattern of Local Rules
Sebastian Risi and Kenneth O. Stanley (2010)
In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB 2010). New York, NY: Springer (11 pages)

Evolving the Placement and Density of Neurons in the HyperNEAT Substrate
Sebastian Risi, Joel Lehman, and Kenneth O. Stanley (2010)
In: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2010). New York, NY:ACM (8 pages)
Winner of the Best Paper Award in the GDS Track at GECCO-2010

Evolving Policy Geometry for Scalable Multiagent Learning
David B. D’Ambrosio, Joel Lehman, Sebastian Risi, and Kenneth O. Stanley
In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2010). 2010 (8 pages).
Note: This paper is accompanied with a set of videos

2009

How Novelty Search Escapes the Deceptive Trap of Learning to Learn
Sebastian Risi, Sandy Vanderbleek, Charles Hughes and Kenneth Stanley
In: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2009). New York, NY: ACM, 2009. 8 pages.
Winner of a Best Paper Award at GECCO-2009

2007

Visual mining in music collections with Emergent SOM
Sebastian Risi, Fabian Mörchen, Alfred Ultsch and Pascal Lehwark
In: Proceedings Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps (WSOM ’07),  Bielefeld, Germany.

Visualization and clustering of tagged music data
Pascal Lehwark, Sebastian Risi and Alfred Ultsch
In: Proceedings 31st Annual Conference of the German Classification Society (GfKl 2007), Freiburg, Germany