Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation - Proceedings of WIVACE 2025

This volume of Communications in Computer and Information Science contains the proceedings of WIVACE 2025, the XIX Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation. The workshop took place from September 3 to 5, 2025, at the Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics of the University of Siena, Italy, and was organized as a satellite event of the 21st Conference of the Complex Systems Society (CCS 2025). The International Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation aims to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines to present and exchange ideas, results, and perspectives within a multidisciplinary setting. It serves as a forum for discussing emerging research directions and innovative applications in Artificial Life, Evolutionary Computation, and related areas, fostering interaction among different scientific communities. In particular, the workshop promotes collaboration among computer scientists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists to explore topics such as the modeling and simulation of life mechanisms, evolution and adaptation, and collective and social behaviors, with the goal of advancing technological solutions inspired by biological principles. The workshop was organized over two and a half days and featured single–track sessions including 11 oral presentations and 5 poster presentations. Its format was specifically designed to encourage interaction among doctoral students and early–career researchers, providing a collaborative and constructive environment in which participants could discuss ideas and disseminate their work. WIVACE 2025 also featured two keynote speakers, who opened the morning sessions of the two main workshop days: Stefano Melacci, from the University of Siena, and Diego Garlaschelli, from IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca (Italy) and Leiden Institute of Physics (The Netherlands). Their keynote talks, respectively titled Collectionless Artificial Intelligence: Peer–to–Peer Networks of Agents for Decentralized Learning Over Time and Multi–Scale Node Embeddings for Graph Modeling and Generation, provided stimulating perspectives on current research challenges at the intersection of artificial intelligence, complex systems, and network science. Overall, the workshop received 15 submissions, of which 14 were selected for inclusion in this volume following a two–round single–blind review in which each submission received an average of two reviews from members of the Program Committee. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the PC members for their valuable contribution to the review and selection process. We also take this opportunity to thank the Local Organizing Committee — Simone Bonechi, Barbara Toniella Corradini, and Marco Stefanelli of the Siena Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAILab) at the University of Siena — for their essential support in organizing the event. Last but not least, we are grateful to the staff of the University of Siena and the host institution for providing the facilities and infrastructure that made the workshop possible.