  The mass assembly history (MAH) of dark matter halos plays a crucial role in
shaping the formation and evolution of galaxies. MAHs are used extensively in
semi-analytic and empirical models of galaxy formation, yet current analytic
methods to generate them are inaccurate and unable to capture their
relationship with the halo internal structure and large-scale environment. This
paper introduces FLORAH, a machine-learning framework for generating assembly
histories of ensembles of dark matter halos. We train FLORAH on the assembly
histories from the GUREFT and VSMDPL N-body simulations and demonstrate its
ability to recover key properties such as the time evolution of mass and
concentration. We obtain similar results for the galaxy stellar mass versus
halo mass relation and its residuals when we run the Santa Cruz semi-analytic
model on FLORAH-generated assembly histories and halo formation histories
extracted from an N-body simulation. We further show that FLORAH also
reproduces the dependence of clustering on properties other than mass (assembly
bias), which is not captured by other analytic methods. By combining multiple
networks trained on a suite of simulations with different redshift ranges and
mass resolutions, we are able to construct accurate main progenitor branches
(MPBs) with a wide dynamic mass range from $z = 0$ up to an ultra-high redshift
$z \approx 20$, currently far beyond that of a single N-body simulation. FLORAH
is the first step towards a machine learning-based framework for planting full
merger trees; this will enable the exploration of different galaxy formation
scenarios with great computational efficiency at unprecedented accuracy.

Astrophysics of Galaxies;Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics