Daily Program Overview

July 24, 2026 · Afternoon Sessions

TimeSessionChair
14:00-14:40Invited Talk
Role of LLM in Data-Driven Evolutionary Optimization
Speaker: Prof. Handing Wang
Chair: Yu Xue
14:40-15:20Invited Talk: Evolutionary Computation for Automated
Speaker: Prof. Shinichi Shirakawa
Chair: Zhixing Huang
15:20-15:40Tea Break
15:40-16:20Invited Talk: Recent Advances in LLM-based Evolutionary Program Search and Its Application to Neural Architecture Search
Speaker: Prof. Zhichao Lu
Chair: Dujuan Wang
16:20-17:00Invited Talk: Feature Reduction for Complex Data: From Streaming Scenarios to Long-Tail Distributions
Speaker: Prof. Ruwang Jiao
Chair: Junhao Huang
17:00-17:40Invited Talk: From Single Rules to Adaptive Heuristic Families: Ensemble, Task-Aware, Preference-Aware, and Transformer-Guided Genetic Programming
Speaker: Prof. Meng Xu
Chair: Yahui Jia

July 25, 2026 · Morning Sessions

TimeSessionChair
9:00-9:40Opening CeremonyChair: Yanan Sun
9:40-10:20Invited Talk: From Distributive Fairness to Procedural Fairness in Machine Learning
Speaker: Prof. Xin Yao
Chair: Mengjie Zhang
10:20-10:40Tea Break
10:40-11:20Invited Talk: The AI Research Revolution: How Language Models Are Changing the Way We Conduct Research
Speaker: Prof. Yew-Soon Ong
Chair: Bing Xue
11:20-12:00Panel Discussion: The Synergy Triangle – How Evolution, Learning, and Foundation Models Complete Each Other
Panelists: Xin Yao, Risto Miikkulainen, Bing Xue, Ke Tang, Ting Hu
Chair: Wolfgang Banzhaf

July 25, 2026 · Afternoon Sessions

TimeSessionChair
14:00-14:40Invited Talk: Neuroevolution 3.0: Fine-tuning LLMs with evolution strategie
Speaker: Prof. Risto Miikkulainen
Chair: Yanan Sun
14:40-15:20Invited Talk: Program Trace Optimization: Theory and Practice
Speaker: Prof. Alberto Moraglio
Chair: Ying Bi
15:20-15:40Tea Break
15:40-16:20Invited Talk: Why Evolution Favors Simplicity: The Role of Neutral Networks
Speaker: Prof. Ting Hu
Chair: Cuie Yang
16:20-17:00Invited Talk: Automated Algorithms – Where Evolutionary Computation, GP and Learning Meet
Speaker: Prof. Rong Qu
Chair: Jinghui Zhong
17:00-17:40Panel Discussion: The Adoption Gap – Why Isn't GP/EML Everywhere, and What Will It Take to Get There?
Panelists: Wolfgang Banzhaf, Rong Qu, Shinichi Shirakawa, Alberto Moraglio, Yuan Yuan
Chair: Mengjie Zhang

July 26, 2025 · Morning Sessions

TimeSessionChair
9:00-9:40Invited Talk: Data-Driven Optimization of Complex Systems Assisted by Small Surrogates and Large Language Models
Speaker: Prof. Yaochu Jin
Chair: Wolfgang Banzhaf
9:40-10:20Invited Talk: Algorithm Space Distillation - A perspective on data-driven automated algorithm design
Speaker: Prof. Ke Tang
Chair: Liang Feng
10:20-10:40Tea Break
10:40-11:20Invited Talk: From LLM Reasoning to Continually Evolving Scheduling Intelligence
Speaker: Prof. Yuan Yuan
Chair: Ye Tian
11:20-12:00Invited Talk: Causal Learning and its Applications
Speaker: Prof. Huanhuan Chen
Chair: Mengjie Zhang
12:00-12:20Closing CeremonyChair: Yanan Sun