Publications

2025

• Alexander E. I. Brownlee, James Callan, Karine Even-Mendoza, Alina Geiger, Carol Hanna, Justyna Petke, Federica Sarro and Dominik Sobania: Large language model based mutations in genetic improvement.Autom. Softw. Eng., Volume 32, Number 1, 2025, 15.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania, Justyna Petke, Martin Briesch and Franz Rothlauf: A Comparison of Large Language Models and Genetic Programming for Program Synthesis.IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput., Volume 29, Number 4, 2025, 1434-1448.   [DOI]
• Alina Geiger, Martin Briesch, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Was Tournament Selection All We Ever Needed? A Critical Reflection on Lexicase Selection. In: Bing Xue, Luca Manzoni and Illya Bakurov (eds.): Genetic Programming - 28th European Conference, EuroGP 2025, Held as Part of EvoStar 2025, Trieste, Italy, April 23-25, 2025, Proceedings , Volume 15609 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Springer , 2025 , 207-223.   [DOI]
• Philipp Anthes, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Transformer Semantic Genetic Programming for Symbolic Regression. In: Bogdan Filipic (eds.): Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2025, NH Malaga Hotel, Malaga, Spain, July 14-18, 2025 , ACM , 2025 , 952-960.   [DOI]
• Alina Geiger, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Selection Methods in Genetic Programming: A Performance Analysis. In: Bogdan Filipic (eds.): Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion, GECCO 2025, NH Malaga Hotel, Malaga, Spain, July 14-18, 2025 , ACM , 2025 , 31-32.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania, Martin Briesch and Franz Rothlauf: ImageBreeder: Guiding Diffusion Models with Evolutionary Computation. In: Bogdan Filipic (eds.): Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2025, NH Malaga Hotel, Malaga, Spain, July 14-18, 2025 , ACM , 2025 , 463-471.   [DOI]
• Marc Christoph de Zoeten, Marcel Hauck, Martin Briesch, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Let Me Entertain You: On the Bias of Editorial and Algorithmic Recommendations in Public Service Media. In: Ivan Lukovic, Srdja Bjeladinovic, Boris Delibasic, Dusan Barac, Netta Iivari, Emilio Insfrán, Michael Lang, Henry Linger and Christoph Schneider (eds.): Empowering the Interdisciplinary Role of ISD in Addressing Contemporary Issues in Digital Transformation - Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Information Systems Development, ISD 2025, Belgrade, Serbia, September 3-5 2025 , University of Gdansk, University of Belgrade, Association for Information Systems , 2025 .   [DOI]
• Karine Even-Mendoza, Alexander E. I. Brownlee, Alina Geiger, Carol Hanna, Justyna Petke, Federica Sarro and Dominik Sobania: LLM-Guided Genetic Improvement: Envisioning Semantic Aware Automated Software Evolution. In: 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2025, Seoul, Korea, Republic of, November 16-20, 2025 , IEEE , 2025 , 3902-3906.   [DOI]
• Karine Even-Mendoza, Alexander Brownlee, Alina Geiger, Carol Hanna, Justyna Petke, Federica Sarro and Dominik Sobania: Artifact of LLM-Guided Genetic Improvement: Envisioning Semantic Aware Automated Software Evolution (Version 1), Zenodo, July 2025.  Accessed on YYYY-MM-DD..  [DOI]
• Philipp Anthes, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Transformer Semantic Genetic Programming for Symbolic Regression.CoRR, Volume abs/2501.18479, 2025.   [DOI]
• Alina Geiger, Martin Briesch, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Was Tournament Selection All We Ever Needed? A Critical Reflection on Lexicase Selection.CoRR, Volume abs/2502.18093, 2025.   [DOI]
• Karine Even-Mendoza, Alexander E. I. Brownlee, Alina Geiger, Carol Hanna, Justyna Petke, Federica Sarro and Dominik Sobania: LLM-Guided Genetic Improvement: Envisioning Semantic Aware Automated Software Evolution.CoRR, Volume abs/2508.18089, 2025.   [DOI]
• Philipp Anthes, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Transformer Semantic Genetic Programming for d-dimensional Symbolic Regression Problems.CoRR, Volume abs/2511.09416, 2025.   [DOI]

2024

• Ryan Boldi, Martin Briesch, Dominik Sobania, Alexander Lalejini, Thomas Helmuth, Franz Rothlauf, Charles Ofria and Lee Spector: Informed Down-Sampled Lexicase Selection: Identifying Productive Training Cases for Efficient Problem Solving.Evol. Comput., Volume 32, Number 4, 2024, 307-337.   [DOI]
• Louisa Schwarz, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: On relevant features for the recurrence prediction of urothelial carcinoma of the bladder.Int. J. Medical Informatics, Volume 186, 2024, 105414.   [DOI]
• Alina Geiger, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: A Comprehensive Comparison of Lexicase-Based Selection Methods for Symbolic Regression Problems. In: Mario Giacobini, Bing Xue and Luca Manzoni (eds.): Genetic Programming - 27th European Conference, EuroGP 2024, Held as Part of EvoStar 2024, Aberystwyth, UK, April 3-5, 2024, Proceedings , Volume 14631 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Springer , 2024 , 192-208.   [DOI]
• Ryan Boldi, Ashley Bao, Martin Briesch, Thomas Helmuth, Dominik Sobania, Lee Spector and Alexander Lalejini: A Comprehensive Analysis of Down-sampling for Genetic Programming-based Program Synthesis. In: Xiaodong Li and Julia Handl (eds.): Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion, GECCO 2024, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, July 14-18, 2024 , ACM , 2024 , 487-490.   [DOI]
• Martin Briesch, Ryan Boldi, Dominik Sobania, Alexander Lalejini, Thomas Helmuth, Franz Rothlauf, Charles Ofria and Lee Spector: Improving Lexicase Selection with Informed Down-Sampling. In: Xiaodong Li and Julia Handl (eds.): Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion, GECCO 2024, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, July 14-18, 2024 , ACM , 2024 , 25-26.   [DOI]
• Alina Geiger, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Lexicase-based Selection Methods with Down-sampling for Symbolic Regression Problems: Overview and Benchmark.CoRR, Volume abs/2407.21632, 2024.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania, Martin Briesch and Franz Rothlauf: ComfyGI: Automatic Improvement of Image Generation Workflows.CoRR, Volume abs/2411.14193, 2024.   [DOI]

2023

• Dominik Sobania, Dirk Schweim and Franz Rothlauf: A Comprehensive Survey on Program Synthesis With Evolutionary Algorithms.IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput., Volume 27, Number 1, 2023, 82-97.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania, Martin Briesch, Philipp Röchner and Franz Rothlauf: MTGP: Combining Metamorphic Testing and Genetic Programming. In: Gisele L. Pappa, Mario Giacobini and Zdenek Vasıcek (eds.): Genetic Programming - 26th European Conference, EuroGP 2023, Held as Part of EvoStar 2023, Brno, Czech Republic, April 12-14, 2023, Proceedings , Volume 13986 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Springer , 2023 , 324-338.   [DOI]
• Ryan Boldi, Ashley Bao, Martin Briesch, Thomas Helmuth, Dominik Sobania, Lee Spector and Alexander Lalejini: The Problem Solving Benefits of Down-sampling Vary by Selection Scheme. In: Sara Silva and Luıs Paquete (eds.): Companion Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, GECCO 2023, Companion Volume, Lisbon, Portugal, July 15-19, 2023 , ACM , 2023 , 527-530.   [DOI]
• Martin Briesch, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: On the Trade-Off between Population Size and Number of Generations in GP for Program Synthesis. In: Sara Silva and Luıs Paquete (eds.): Companion Proceedings of the Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, GECCO 2023, Companion Volume, Lisbon, Portugal, July 15-19, 2023 , ACM , 2023 , 535-538.   [DOI]
• Alina Geiger, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Down-Sampled Epsilon-Lexicase Selection for Real-World Symbolic Regression Problems. In: Sara Silva and Luıs Paquete (eds.): Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2023, Lisbon, Portugal, July 15-19, 2023 , ACM , 2023 , 1109-1117.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania, Martin Briesch, Carol Hanna and Justyna Petke: An Analysis of the Automatic Bug Fixing Performance of ChatGPT. In: IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Automated Program Repair, APR@ICSE 2023, Melbourne, Australia, May 16, 2023 , IEEE , 2023 , 23-30.   [DOI]
• Alexander E. I. Brownlee, James Callan, Karine Even-Mendoza, Alina Geiger, Carol Hanna, Justyna Petke, Federica Sarro and Dominik Sobania: Enhancing Genetic Improvement Mutations Using Large Language Models. In: Paolo Arcaini, Tao Yue and Erik M. Fredericks (eds.): Search-Based Software Engineering - 15th International Symposium, SSBSE 2023, San Francisco, CA, USA, December 8, 2023, Proceedings , Volume 14415 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Springer , 2023 , 153-159.   [DOI]
• Ryan Boldi, Martin Briesch, Dominik Sobania, Alexander Lalejini, Thomas Helmuth, Franz Rothlauf, Charles Ofria and Lee Spector: Informed Down-Sampled Lexicase Selection: Identifying productive training cases for efficient problem solving.CoRR, Volume abs/2301.01488, 2023.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania, Martin Briesch, Carol Hanna and Justyna Petke: An Analysis of the Automatic Bug Fixing Performance of ChatGPT.CoRR, Volume abs/2301.08653, 2023.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania, Martin Briesch, Philipp Röchner and Franz Rothlauf: MTGP: Combining Metamorphic Testing and Genetic Programming.CoRR, Volume abs/2301.08665, 2023.   [DOI]
• Alina Geiger, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Down-Sampled Epsilon-Lexicase Selection for Real-World Symbolic Regression Problems.CoRR, Volume abs/2302.04301, 2023.   [DOI]
• Ryan Boldi, Ashley Bao, Martin Briesch, Thomas Helmuth, Dominik Sobania, Lee Spector and Alexander Lalejini: Analyzing the Interaction Between Down-Sampling and Selection.CoRR, Volume abs/2304.07089, 2023.   [DOI]
• Martin Huschens, Martin Briesch, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Do You Trust ChatGPT? - Perceived Credibility of Human and AI-Generated Content.CoRR, Volume abs/2309.02524, 2023.   [DOI]
• Alexander E. I. Brownlee, James Callan, Karine Even-Mendoza, Alina Geiger, Carol Hanna, Justyna Petke, Federica Sarro and Dominik Sobania: Enhancing Genetic Improvement Mutations Using Large Language Models.CoRR, Volume abs/2310.19813, 2023.   [DOI]
• Martin Briesch, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Large Language Models Suffer From Their Own Output: An Analysis of the Self-Consuming Training Loop.CoRR, Volume abs/2311.16822, 2023.   [DOI]

2022

• Dominik Sobania:On the structure and generalizability of programs synthesized by genetic programming.PhD thesis,University of Mainz, Germany, 2022.  
• Dominik Sobania, Jonas Schmitt, Harald Köstler and Franz Rothlauf: Genetic programming for iterative numerical methods.Genet. Program. Evolvable Mach., Volume 23, Number 2, 2022, 253-278.   [DOI]
• Dirk Schweim, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Effects of the Training Set Size: A Comparison of Standard and Down-Sampled Lexicase Selection in Program Synthesis. In: IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, CEC 2022, Padua, Italy, July 18-23, 2022 , IEEE , 2022 , 1-8.   [DOI]
• Dirk Schweim, Erik Hemberg, Dominik Sobania and Una-May O'Reilly: Exploiting Knowledge from Code to Guide Program Search. In: Eric Medvet, Gisele L. Pappa and Bing Xue (eds.): Genetic Programming - 25th European Conference, EuroGP 2022, Held as Part of EvoStar 2022, Madrid, Spain, April 20-22, 2022, Proceedings , Volume 13223 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Springer , 2022 , 262-277.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania, Martin Briesch and Franz Rothlauf: Choose your programming copilot: a comparison of the program synthesis performance of github copilot and genetic programming. In: Jonathan E. Fieldsend and Markus Wagner (eds.): GECCO '22: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, July 9 - 13, 2022 , ACM , 2022 , 1019-1027.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania, Martin Briesch, David Wittenberg and Franz Rothlauf: Analyzing optimized constants in genetic programming on a real-world regression problem. In: Jonathan E. Fieldsend and Markus Wagner (eds.): GECCO '22: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Companion Volume, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, July 9 - 13, 2022 , ACM , 2022 , 606-607.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania, Dirk Schweim and Franz Rothlauf: Program synthesis with evolutionary algorithms: Status quo: hot off the press track (GECCO 2022). In: Jonathan E. Fieldsend and Markus Wagner (eds.): GECCO '22: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Companion Volume, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, July 9 - 13, 2022 , ACM , 2022 , 39-40.   [DOI]
• Martin Briesch, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: The Randomness of Input Data Spaces is an A Priori Predictor for Generalization. In: Ralph Bergmann, Lukas Malburg, Stephanie C. Rodermund and Ingo J. Timm (eds.): KI 2022: Advances in Artificial Intelligence - 45th German Conference on AI, Trier, Germany, September 19-23, 2022, Proceedings , Volume 13404 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Springer , 2022 , 17-30.   [DOI]

2021

• Dominik Sobania: On the Generalizability of Programs Synthesized by Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming. In: Ting Hu, Nuno Lourenço and Eric Medvet (eds.): Genetic Programming - 24th European Conference, EuroGP 2021, Held as Part of EvoStar 2021, Virtual Event, April 7-9, 2021, Proceedings , Volume 12691 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Springer , 2021 , 130-145.   [DOI]
• Christian Olmscheid, David Wittenberg, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Improving estimation of distribution genetic programming with novelty initialization. In: Krzysztof Krawiec (eds.): GECCO '21: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Companion Volume, Lille, France, July 10-14, 2021 , ACM , 2021 , 261-262.   [DOI]
• Dirk Schweim, Erik Hemberg, Dominik Sobania, Una-May O'Reilly and Franz Rothlauf: Using knowledge of human-generated code to bias the search in program synthesis with grammatical evolution. In: Krzysztof Krawiec (eds.): GECCO '21: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Companion Volume, Lille, France, July 10-14, 2021 , ACM , 2021 , 331-332.   [DOI]
• Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: A generalizability measure for program synthesis with genetic programming. In: Francisco Chicano and Krzysztof Krawiec (eds.): GECCO '21: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Lille, France, July 10-14, 2021 , ACM , 2021 , 822-829.   [DOI]
• Martin Briesch, Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: The Randomness of Input Data Spaces is an A Priori Predictor for Generalization.CoRR, Volume abs/2106.04181, 2021.  
• Dominik Sobania, Dirk Schweim and Franz Rothlauf: Recent Developments in Program Synthesis with Evolutionary Algorithms.CoRR, Volume abs/2108.12227, 2021.  
• Dominik Sobania, Martin Briesch and Franz Rothlauf: Choose Your Programming Copilot: A Comparison of the Program Synthesis Performance of GitHub Copilot and Genetic Programming.CoRR, Volume abs/2111.07875, 2021.  

2020

• Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Challenges of Program Synthesis with Grammatical Evolution. In: Ting Hu, Nuno Lourenço, Eric Medvet and Federico Divina (eds.): Genetic Programming - 23rd European Conference, EuroGP 2020, Held as Part of EvoStar 2020, Seville, Spain, April 15-17, 2020, Proceedings , Volume 12101 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Springer , 2020 , 211-227.   [DOI]

2019

• Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: Teaching GP to program like a human software developer: using perplexity pressure to guide program synthesis approaches. In: Anne Auger and Thomas Stützle (eds.): Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2019, Prague, Czech Republic, July 13-17, 2019 , ACM , 2019 , 1065-1074.   [DOI]

2018

• Dominik Sobania and Franz Rothlauf: CovSel: A new approach for ensemble selection applied to symbolic regression problems. In: Hernán E. Aguirre and Keiki Takadama (eds.): Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2018, Kyoto, Japan, July 15-19, 2018 , ACM , 2018 , 529-536.   [DOI]