Adversarial attacks to image classification systems using evolutionary algorithms

Image classification currently faces significant security challenges due to adversarial attacks, which consist of intentional alterations designed to deceive classification models based on artificial intelligence. This article explores an approach to generate adversarial attacks against image classifiers using a combination of evolutionary algorithms and generative adversarial networks. The proposed approach explores the latent space of a generative adversarial network with an evolutionary algorithm to find vectors representing adversarial attacks. The approach was evaluated in two case studies corresponding to the classification of handwritten digits and object images. The results showed success rates of up to 35% for handwritten digits, and up to 75% for object images, improving over other search methods and reported results in related works. The applied method proved to be effective in handling data diversity on the target datasets, even in problem instances that presented additional challenges due to the complexity and richness of information.

Multi-population GAN Training: Analyzing Co-Evolutionary Algorithms

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are powerful generative models but remain challenging to train due to pathologies suchas mode collapse and instability. Recent research has explored co-evolutionary approaches, in which populations of generators and discriminators are evolved, as a promising solution. This paper presents an empirical analysis of different coevolutionary GAN training strategies, focusing on the impact of selection and replacement mechanisms. We compare (mu,lambda), (mu+lambda) with elitism, and (mu+lambda) with tournament selection coevolutionary schemes, along with a non-evolutionary population based multi-generator multi-discriminator GAN baseline, across both synthetic low-dimensional datasets (blob and gaussian mixtures) and an image-based benchmark (MNIST). Results show that full generational replacement, i.e., (mu,lambda), consistently outperforms in terms of both sample quality and diversity, particularly when combined with larger offspring sizes. In contrast, elitist approaches tend to converge prematurely and suffer from reduced diversity. These findings highlight the importance of balancing exploration and exploitation dynamics in coevolutionary GAN training and provide guidance for designing more effective population-based generative models.

Guiding Evolutionary AutoEncoder Training with Activation-Based Pruning Operators

This study explores a novel approach to neural network pruning using evolutionary computation, focusing on simultaneously pruning the encoder and decoder of an autoencoder. We introduce two new mutation operators that use layer activations to guide weight pruning. Our findings reveal that one of these activation-informed operators outperforms random pruning, resulting in more efficient autoencoders with comparable performance to canonically trained models. Prior work has established that autoencoder training is effective and scalable with a spatial coevolutionary algorithm that cooperatively coevolves a population of encoders with a population of decoders, rather than one autoencoder. We evaluate how the same activity-guided mutation operators transfer to this context. We find that random pruning is better than guided pruning, in the coevolutionary setting. This suggests activation-based guidance proves more effective in low-dimensional pruning environments, where constrained sample spaces can lead to deviations from true uniformity in randomization. Conversely, population-driven strategies enhance robustness by expanding the total pruning dimensionality, achieving statistically uniform randomness that better preserves system dynamics. We experiment with pruning according to different schedules and present best combinations of operator and schedule for the canonical and coevolving populations cases.

Generate more than one child in your co-evolutionary semi-supervised learning GAN

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are very useful methods to address semi-supervised learning (SSL) datasets, thanks to their ability to generate samples similar to real data. This approach, called SSL-GAN has attracted many researchers in the last decade. Evolutionary algorithms have been used to guide the evolution and training of SSL-GANs with great success. In particular, several co-evolutionary approaches have been applied where the two networks of a GAN (the generator and the discriminator) are evolved in separate populations. The co-evolutionary approaches published to date assume some spatial structure of the populations, based on the ideas of cellular evolutionary algorithms. They also create one single individual per generation and follow a generational replacement strategy in the evolution. In this paper, we re-consider those algorithmic design decisions and propose a new co-evolutionary approach, called Co-evolutionary Elitist SSL-GAN (CE-SSLGAN), with panmictic population, elitist replacement, and more than one individual in the offspring. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method using three standard benchmark datasets. The results show that creating more than one offspring per population and using elitism improves the results in comparison with a classical SSL-GAN.

Infrastructure Deployment in Vehicular Communication Networks Using a Parallel Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm

This article describes the application of a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm for locating roadside infrastructure for vehicular communication networks over realistic urban areas. A multiobjective formulation of the problem is introduced, considering quality-of-service and cost objectives. The experimental analysis is performed over a real map of M\'alaga, using real traffic information and antennas, and scenarios that model different combinations of traffic patterns and applications (text/audio/video) in the communications. The proposed multiobjective evolutionary algorithm computes accurate trade-off solutions, significantly improving over state-of-the-art algorithms previously applied to the problem.

Fast energy-aware OLSR routing in VANETs by means of a parallel evolutionary algorithm

This work tackles the problem of reducing the power consumption of the OLSR routing protocol in vehicular networks. Nowadays, energy-aware and green communication protocols are important research topics, specially when deploying wireless mobile networks. This article introduces a fast automatic methodology to search for energy-efficient OLSR configurations by using a parallel evolutionary algorithm. The experimental analysis demonstrates that significant improvements over the standard configuration can be attained in terms of power consumption, with no noteworthy loss in the QoS.

A swarm algorithm for collaborative traffic in vehicular networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) allow vehicles to exchange warning messages with each other. These specific kinds of networks help reduce hazardous traffic situations and improve safety, which are two of the main objectives in developing Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). For this, the performance of VANETs should guarantee the delivery of messages in a required time. An obstacle to this is that the data traffic generated may cause network congestion. Data congestion control is used to enhance network capabilities, increasing the reliability of the VANET by decreasing packet losses and communication delays. In this study, we propose a swarm intelligence based distributed congestion control strategy to maintain the channel usage level under the threshold of network malfunction, while keeping the quality-of-service of the VANET high. An exhaustive experimentation shows that the proposed strategy improves the throughput of the network, the channel usage, and the stability of the communications in comparison with other competing congestion control strategies.

Parallel multi-objective metaheuristics for smart communications in vehicular networks

This article analyzes the use of two parallel multi-objective soft computing algorithms to automatically search for high-quality settings of the Ad hoc On Demand Vector routing protocol for vehicular networks. These methods are based on an evolutionary algorithm and on a swarm intelligence approach. The experimental analysis demonstrates that the configurations computed by our optimization algorithms outperform other state-of-the-art optimized ones. In turn, the computational efficiency achieved by all the parallel versions is greater than 87 %. Therefore, the line of work presented in this article represents an efficient framework to improve vehicular communications.

Intelligent OLSR Routing Protocol Optimization for VANETs

Recent advances in wireless technologies have given rise to the emergence of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In such networks, the limited coverage of WiFi and the high mobility of the nodes generate frequent topology changes and network fragmentations. For these reasons, and taking into account that there is no central manager entity, routing packets through the network is a challenging task. Therefore, offering an efficient routing strategy is crucial to the deployment of VANETs. This paper deals with the optimal parameter setting of the optimized link state routing (OLSR), which is a well-known mobile ad hoc network routing protocol, by defining an optimization problem. This way, a series of representative metaheuristic algorithms (particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, genetic algorithm, and simulated annealing) are studied in this paper to find automatically optimal configurations of this routing protocol. In addition, a set of realistic VANET scenarios (based in the city of M\'alaga) have been defined to accurately evaluate the performance of the network under our automatic OLSR. In the experiments, our tuned OLSR configurations result in better quality of service (QoS) than the standard request for comments (RFC 3626), as well as several human experts, making it amenable for utilization in VANET configurations.

Automatic tuning of communication protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks using metaheuristics

The emerging field of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) deals with a set of communicating vehicles which are able to spontaneously interconnect without any pre-existing infrastructure. In such kind of networks, it is crucial to make an optimal configuration of the communication protocols previously to the final network deployment. This way, a human designer can obtain an optimal QoS of the network beforehand. The problem we consider in this work lies in configuring the File Transfer protocol Configuration (FTC) with the aim of optimizing the transmission time, the number of lost packets, and the amount of data transferred in realistic VANET scenarios. We face the FTC with five representative state-of-the-art optimization techniques and compare their performance. These algorithms are: Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Differential Evolution (DE), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Evolutionary Strategy (ES), and Simulated Annealing (SA). For our tests, two typical environment instances of VANETs for Urban and Highway scenarios have been defined. The experiments using ns- 2 (a well-known realistic VANET simulator) reveal that PSO outperforms all the compared algorithms for both studied VANET instances.