Our team warmly congratulates Dr. Dominik Sobania on his new position as junior professor (W1 t.t. W3) for ‘Generative Artificial Intelligence in Software Engineering’ at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Dominik has held the new professorship at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 1 January 2025.
Dr. Sobania worked as a research assistant and postdoctoral lecturer at our chair from April 2017 to December 2025. During this time, he had a significant impact on and further developed the chair's research and teaching activities.
He defended his dissertation in December 2022 with outstanding success. Since then, he has made an extremely valuable contribution to research and teaching.
His work is characterised in particular by high scientific quality, methodological depth and a strong application orientation. In addition, he has been continuously involved in supervising students, theses and the further development of courses.
With his appointment, the University of Duisburg-Essen gains a scientist with outstanding academic achievements and a forward-looking research profile in the field of generative AI and software engineering.
We would like to express our sincere thanks for the many years of successful cooperation and wish Dominik every success, joy and all the best in his new academic role.
Towards the end of his doctoral studies, Martin Briesch completed a three-month research stay at the Adaptive & Intelligent Robotics Lab headed by Prof. Antoine Cully at Imperial College London.
As part of his research work there, he focused on the combination of large language models (LLMs) and evolutionary methods.
We wish Martin every success for his research stay and looking forward to the new ideas he will bring back from London.
This year’s Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2025) in Málaga was a complete success. Our research group was represented with three contributions, all of which attracted significant interest.
Best Paper Award for TSGP
We are very proud of the Best Paper Award for the contribution “Transformer Semantic Genetic Programming for Symbolic Regression” by Philipp Anthes, Dominik Sobania, and Franz Rothlauf.
The paper presents an innovative approach that solves symbolic regression problems by integrating transformer-based neural networks into genetic programming. By taking solution behavior into account, the method can produce compact models with strong predictive performance after only a few iterations.
Evolutionary Image Generation with ImageBreeder
Star Wars goes GECCO – May the fo
rce be with your image generation!
Martin Briesch and Dominik Sobania presented ImageBreeder, a novel approach to evolutionary image generation.
The system combines diffusion models with evolutionary algorithms to algorithmically optimize the visual quality of generated images. The project attracted significant attention and shows promising potential for fully autonomous image optimization—without any human feedback.
Benchmarking Selection Methods in Genetic Programming
Alina Geiger presented her recently published benchmark study in Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization.
The study compares the performance of modern Lexicase-based selection methods (ε‑Lexicase, Batch‑Lexicase, Plexicase) with traditional methods like Tournament Selection and Fitness-Proportionate Selection—each combined with various downsampling strategies. The results offer valuable insights for choosing and combining selection and downsampling strategies in genetic programming.
We sincerely congratulate everyone involved on their contributions and are already looking forward to GECCO 2026!
Recent Publications
Books
