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Wenyin Gong

Publications and source records attributed to Wenyin Gong.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

NeurGO: Learning to Generate Elite Candidates for Meta-Black-Box Expensive Optimization

Expensive black-box optimization is ubiquitous in science and engineering, where function evaluations are costly and the evaluation budget is limited. Traditional evolutionary algorithms and Meta-BlackBox Optimization (MetaBBO) approaches typically consume most evaluations on candidate selection, often wasting precious budget on inferior solutions. Although surrogate-assisted evolution and Bayesian optimization aim to reduce evaluations through surrogate models, constructing an accurate global model from limited data remains challenging, and model bias can easily trap the search in local optima. To overcome these limitations, we propose NeurGO, a generative MetaBBO framework that directly synthesizes elite candidates from historical population states. Specifically, we employ an attention-based encoder to capture the population-level search trend and condition a decoder on this representation to generate high-quality candidates, avoiding the expensive evaluation of large offspring pools. We then design a quality-diversity loss to maintain solution quality and population diversity throughout the search. Through extensive benchmarking on CEC 2008 and the COCO BBOB test suites, our method achieves better optimization performance under the same evaluation budget and exhibits faster convergence.

cs.AI↗

MToP: A MATLAB Benchmarking Platform for Evolutionary Multitasking

Evolutionary multitasking (EMT) has emerged as a popular topic of evolutionary computation over the past decade. It aims to concurrently address multiple optimization tasks within limited computing resources, leveraging inter-task knowledge transfer techniques. Despite the abundance of multitask evolutionary algorithms (MTEAs) proposed for multitask optimization (MTO), there remains a need for a comprehensive software platform to help researchers evaluate MTEA performance on benchmark MTO problems as well as explore real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first open-source benchmarking platform, named MToP, for EMT. MToP incorporates over 50 MTEAs, more than 200 MTO problem cases with real-world applications, and over 20 performance metrics. Based on these, we provide benchmarking recommendations tailored for different MTO scenarios. Moreover, to facilitate comparative analyses between MTEAs and traditional evolutionary algorithms, we adapted over 50 popular single-task evolutionary algorithms to address MTO problems. Notably, we release extensive pre-run experimental data on benchmark suites to enhance reproducibility and reduce computational overhead for researchers. MToP features a user-friendly graphical interface, facilitating results analysis, data export, and schematic visualization. More importantly, MToP is designed with extensibility in mind, allowing users to develop new algorithms and tackle emerging problem domains. The source code of MToP is available at: https://github.com/intLyc/MTO-Platform

cs.NE↗

Composite Indicator-Guided Infilling Sampling for Expensive Multi-Objective Optimization

In expensive multi-objective optimization, where the evaluation budget is strictly limited, selecting promising candidate solutions for expensive fitness evaluations is critical for accelerating convergence and improving algorithmic performance. However, designing an optimization strategy that effectively balances convergence, diversity, and distribution remains a challenge. To tackle this issue, we propose a composite indicator-based evolutionary algorithm (CI-EMO) for expensive multi-objective optimization. In each generation of the optimization process, CI-EMO first employs NSGA-III to explore the solution space based on fitness values predicted by surrogate models, generating a candidate population. Subsequently, we design a novel composite performance indicator to guide the selection of candidates for real fitness evaluation. This indicator simultaneously considers convergence, diversity, and distribution to improve the efficiency of identifying promising candidate solutions, which significantly improves algorithm performance. The composite indicator-based candidate selection strategy is easy to achieve and computes efficiency. Component analysis experiments confirm the effectiveness of each element in the composite performance indicator. Comparative experiments on three benchmark test sets and real-world problems demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms five state-of-the-art expensive multi-objective optimization algorithms.

cs.NE↗

Constrained Multi-objective Optimization with Deep Reinforcement Learning Assisted Operator Selection

Solving constrained multi-objective optimization problems with evolutionary algorithms has attracted considerable attention. Various constrained multi-objective optimization evolutionary algorithms (CMOEAs) have been developed with the use of different algorithmic strategies, evolutionary operators, and constraint-handling techniques. The performance of CMOEAs may be heavily dependent on the operators used, however, it is usually difficult to select suitable operators for the problem at hand. Hence, improving operator selection is promising and necessary for CMOEAs. This work proposes an online operator selection framework assisted by Deep Reinforcement Learning. The dynamics of the population, including convergence, diversity, and feasibility, are regarded as the state; the candidate operators are considered as actions; and the improvement of the population state is treated as the reward. By using a Q-Network to learn a policy to estimate the Q-values of all actions, the proposed approach can adaptively select an operator that maximizes the improvement of the population according to the current state and thereby improve the algorithmic performance. The framework is embedded into four popular CMOEAs and assessed on 42 benchmark problems. The experimental results reveal that the proposed Deep Reinforcement Learning-assisted operator selection significantly improves the performance of these CMOEAs and the resulting algorithm obtains better versatility compared to nine state-of-the-art CMOEAs.

cs.AI↗