Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIX by Giovanni Iacca, Giorgia Nadizar, Anil Yaman, Doina Bucur, Antonio Della Cioppa, Ting Hu, Eric Medvet, Sarah L. Thomson

This five-volume set, LNCS 16985–16989, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2026, held in Trento, Italy, during August 29-September 2, 2026.

The 165 full papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 527 submissions. The papers cover the following topical sections:

Part I: Theory & Runtime Analysis; Combinatorial Optimization; Landscape Analysis & Benchmarking;

Part II: Multi-Objective Optimization; Swarm Intelligence & ACO;

Part III: Evolution Strategies & Continuous Black-Box Optimization; Bayesian & Surrogate-Assisted Optimization; Quantum Optimization & Computing; EC for ML, Data Science & Domain Applications; General EA Methodology, Operators & Parallel EC;

Part IV: Genetic Programming & Symbolic Regression; Quality-Diversity & Novelty Search; Robotics, Morphology & Design Encoding; Coevolution & Evolutionary Dynamics;

Part V: RL, Hyper-heuristics & Algorithm Selection; LLMs + Evolutionary Computation; Neural Architecture Search, AutoML & Neuroevolution.