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Zeyuan Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Zeyuan Ma.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Meta-Learning-Assisted Constraint Relaxation for Constrained Black-Box Optimization

Constraint handling is central to constrained black-box optimization (BBO), where objective improvement and feasibility restoration often provide conflicting search signals. Existing $ε$-relaxation methods are simple and effective, but their relaxation schedules are usually fixed or manually designed for a limited range of problems. To address this limitation, this letter proposes MeCO, a meta-learning-assisted optimizer that learns an adaptive $ε$-relaxation policy for constrained BBO. MeCO couples a SHADE optimizer with a Double Deep Q-Network controller. At each optimization step, the controller observes compact population and constraint features and selects a scalar action, which is decoded into a relaxation vector for the candidate comparison rule. The policy is trained across constrained BBO instances and then deployed on held-out problems without problem-specific tuning. Experiments on the CEC2017 constrained benchmark, 16 UAV path-planning tasks and eight real-world engineering problems provide evidence that MeCO transfers across held-out benchmark functions, higher dimensions, and an application-domain setting. Ablation and behavior analyses further clarify the roles of constraint-related state features, action scaling, reward shaping, and meta-training.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2026

Learning to Optimize UAV Path Planning for Data Sensing in Wireless Sensor Networks

UAVs have emerged as highly flexible platforms for data sensing in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Path planning for UAVs in such tasks plays a key role to assure remote sensing effectiveness and friendly energy consumption. However, existing approaches show two key limitations: i) they are primarily hand-crafted with certain design biases that harm adaptation on unseen tasks. ii) they predominantly assume idealized spatial complexities of actual environments through simplified simulation, causing them to underperform during real-world deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-assisted planning framework, termed Landscape-Aware Meta Differential Evolution (LAMDE), to tackle the mentioned limitations. The major contributions come from the following aspects. We first re-formulate such UAV path planning problem to embrace challenging constraints. To efficiently navigate this highly constrained space, we propose a bi-level learning to optimize approach, where the meta-level is a trainable algorithm configuration policy that meta-learns an adaptable planning strategy for low-level planning algorithm. To address the potential training data scarcity and distribution shift in real-world environments, we introduce a landscape-aware automatic augmentation scheme that enriches training data. At the low-level, a Differential Evolution algorithm is deployed for solving the path planning tasks. To enhance the solving flexibility, we further design a variable-length encoding strategy that dynamically prunes redundant hover points and optimizes continuous flight parameters concurrently within a unified search space. Based on all proposed designs, we meta-train LAMDE and compare it with representative baselines. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LAMDE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the tested complex UAV path planning tasks in WSN data collection scenarios.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

From Semantic Grounding to Decision Optimization: A Unified Framework for Long-Horizon UAV Vision-Language Navigation

UAV vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) focuses on enabling an aerial agent to follow natural-language instructions in open 3D environments from egocentric visual observations. Current approaches suffer from three coupled issues: weak grounding of instruction-relevant landmarks in visual observations, insufficient exploitation of long-horizon history, and unstable decisions under local traps or repeated exploration. To address these issues, we propose a unified semantic-to-decision framework. First, we present an instruction-grounded semantic enhancement module that injects object-level semantics and relative spatial cues into the current observation state. Subsequently, we develop a relevance-aware dynamic temporal aggregation strategy that reweights the full history buffer while converting a few high-relevance frames into structured landmark prompts for the decoder. Finally, we devise a topology-aware decision method that combines local-optimum cognition with group-relative policy optimization under progress, goal, semantic, and path-compliance rewards. Experiments on the widely used AerialVLN and OpenFly benchmarks clearly demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Rethinking Efficiency in Neural Combinatorial Optimization: Batched Preference Optimization with Mamba

We study efficiency as a first-class objective in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) and present ECO, an efficient learning framework that combines batched preference optimization with a Mamba backbone. Instead of tightly interleaving every policy update with on-policy rollouts, ECO decouples trajectory generation from gradient updates through two stages: supervised warm-up on pre-computed solutions and iterative Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on batched candidate sets generated by the current policy. We pair this learning pipeline with a mixed Mamba encoder-decoder that reduces memory growth on long sequences and improves hardware utilization. A local-search-guided bootstrapping strategy is further used during training to widen preference margins and stabilize iterative improvement. Importantly, local search is only used to construct stronger preference pairs during training and is never invoked at inference time. On TSP and CVRP, ECO achieves the strongest overall performance among the compared neural baselines while also delivering clear advantages in memory usage and throughput. We provide additional analysis on memory scaling, throughput, and the contribution of each design component.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

A Learning-Based Cooperative Coevolution Framework for Heterogeneous Large-Scale Global Optimization

Cooperative Coevolution (CC) effectively addresses Large-Scale Global Optimization (LSGO) via decomposition but struggles with the emerging class of Heterogeneous LSGO (H-LSGO) problems arising from real-world applications, where subproblems exhibit diverse dimensions and distinct landscapes. The prevailing CC paradigm, relying on a fixed low-dimensional optimizer, often fails to navigate this heterogeneity. To address this limitation, we propose the Learning-Based Heterogeneous Cooperative Coevolution Framework (LH-CC). By formulating the optimization process as a Markov Decision Process, LH-CC employs a meta-agent to adaptively select the most suitable optimizer for each subproblem. We also introduce a flexible benchmark suite to generate diverse H-LSGO problem instances. Extensive experiments on 3000-dimensional problems with complex coupling relationships demonstrate that LH-CC achieves superior solution quality and computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, the framework exhibits robust generalization across varying problem instances, optimization horizons, and optimizers. Our findings reveal that dynamic optimizer selection is a pivotal strategy for solving complex H-LSGO problems.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2026

COBRA++: Enhanced COBRA Optimizer with Augmented Surrogate Pool and Reinforced Surrogate Selection

The optimization problems in realistic world present significant challenges onto optimization algorithms, such as the expensive evaluation issue and complex constraint conditions. COBRA optimizer (including its up-to-date variants) is a representative and effective tool for addressing such optimization problems, which introduces 1) RBF surrogate to reduce online evaluation and 2) bi-stage optimization process to alternate search for feasible solution and optimal solution. Though promising, its design space, i.e., surrogate model pool and selection standard, is still manually decided by human expert, resulting in labor-intensive fine-tuning for novel tasks. In this paper, we propose a learning-based adaptive strategy (COBRA++) that enhances COBRA in two aspects: 1) An augmented surrogate pool to break the tie with RBF-like surrogate and hence enhances model diversity and approximation capability; 2) A reinforcement learning-based online model selection policy that empowers efficient and accurate optimization process. The model selection policy is trained to maximize overall performance of COBRA++ across a distribution of constrained optimization problems with diverse properties. We have conducted multi-dimensional validation experiments and demonstrate that COBRA++ achieves substantial performance improvement against vanilla COBRA and its adaptive variant. Ablation studies are provided to support correctness of each design component in COBRA++.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2026

Evolution of Benchmark: Black-Box Optimization Benchmark Design through Large Language Model

Benchmark Design in Black-Box Optimization (BBO) is a fundamental yet open-ended topic. Early BBO benchmarks are predominantly human-crafted, introducing expert bias and constraining diversity. Automating this design process can relieve the human-in-the-loop burden while enhancing diversity and objectivity. We propose Evolution of Benchmark (EoB), an automated BBO benchmark designer empowered by the large language model (LLM) and its program evolution capability. Specifically, we formulate benchmark design as a bi-objective optimization problem towards maximizing (i) landscape diversity and (ii) algorithm-differentiation ability across a portfolio of BBO solvers. Under this paradigm, EoB iteratively prompts LLM to evolve a population of benchmark programs and employs a reflection-based scheme to co-evolve the landscape and its corresponding program. Comprehensive experiments validate our EoB is a competitive candidate in multi-dimensional usages: 1) Benchmarking BBO algorithms; 2) Training and testing learning-assisted BBO algorithms; 3) Extending proxy for expensive real-world problems.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2026

Surrogate Ensemble in Expensive Multi-Objective Optimization via Deep Q-Learning

Surrogate-assisted Evolutionary Algorithms~(SAEAs) have shown promising robustness in solving expensive optimization problems. A key aspect that impacts SAEAs' effectiveness is surrogate model selection, which in existing works is predominantly decided by human developer. Such human-made design choice introduces strong bias into SAEAs and may hurt their expected performance on out-of-scope tasks. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-assisted ensemble framework, termed as SEEMOO, which is capable of scheduling different surrogate models within a single optimization process, hence boosting the overall optimization performance in a cooperative paradigm. Specifically, we focus on expensive multi-objective optimization problems, where multiple objective functions shape a compositional landscape and hence challenge surrogate selection. SEEMOO comprises following core designs: 1) A pre-collected model pool that maintains different surrogate models; 2) An attention-based state-extractor supports universal optimization state representation of problems with varied objective numbers; 3) a deep Q-network serves as dynamic surrogate selector: Given the optimization state, it selects desired surrogate model for current-step evaluation. SEEMOO is trained to maximize the overall optimization performance under a training problem distribution. Extensive benchmark results demonstrate SEEMOO's surrogate ensemble paradigm boosts the optimization performance of single-surrogate baselines. Further ablation studies underscore the importance of SEEMOO's design components.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2026

Detect and Act: Automated Dynamic Optimizer through Meta-Black-Box Optimization

Dynamic Optimization Problems (DOPs) are challenging to address due to their complex nature, i.e., dynamic environment variation. Evolutionary Computation methods are generally advantaged in solving DOPs since they resemble dynamic biological evolution. However, existing evolutionary dynamic optimization methods rely heavily on human-crafted adaptive strategy to detect environment variation in DOPs, and then adapt the searching strategy accordingly. These hand-crafted strategies may perform ineffectively at out-of-box scenarios. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-assisted approach to enable automated variation detection and self-adaption in evolutionary algorithms. This is achieved by borrowing the bi-level learning-to-optimize idea from recent Meta-Black-Box Optimization works. We use a deep Q-network as optimization dynamics detector and searching strategy adapter: It is fed as input with current-step optimization state and then dictates desired control parameters to underlying evolutionary algorithms for next-step optimization. The learning objective is to maximize the expected performance gain across a problem distribution. Once trained, our approach could generalize toward unseen DOPs with automated environment variation detection and self-adaption. To facilitate comprehensive validation, we further construct an easy-to-difficult DOPs testbed with diverse synthetic instances. Extensive benchmark results demonstrate flexible searching behavior and superior performance of our approach in solving DOPs, compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2026

READY: Reward Discovery for Meta-Black-Box Optimization

Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) is an emerging avenue within Optimization community, where algorithm design policy could be meta-learned by reinforcement learning to enhance optimization performance. So far, the reward functions in existing MetaBBO works are designed by human experts, introducing certain design bias and risks of reward hacking. In this paper, we use Large Language Model~(LLM) as an automated reward discovery tool for MetaBBO. Specifically, we consider both effectiveness and efficiency sides. On effectiveness side, we borrow the idea of evolution of heuristics, introducing tailored evolution paradigm in the iterative LLM-based program search process, which ensures continuous improvement. On efficiency side, we additionally introduce multi-task evolution architecture to support parallel reward discovery for diverse MetaBBO approaches. Such parallel process also benefits from knowledge sharing across tasks to accelerate convergence. Empirical results demonstrate that the reward functions discovered by our approach could be helpful for boosting existing MetaBBO works, underscoring the importance of reward design in MetaBBO. We provide READY's project at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ICML_READY-747F.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Offline Multi-Task Multi-Objective Data-Driven Evolutionary Algorithm with Language Surrogate Model and Implicit Q-Learning

Data-driven evolutionary algorithms has shown surprising results in addressing expensive optimization problems through robust surrogate modeling. Though promising, existing surrogate modeling schemes may encounter limitations in complex optimization problems with many sub-objectives, which rely on repeated and tedious approximation. To address such technical gap, we propose Q-MetaSur as a plug-and-play surrogate modeling scheme capable of providing unified and generalized surrogate learning. Specifically, we consider multi-task-multi-objective optimization~(MTMOO) in offline setting. Several key designs are proposed: 1) we transform objective approximation into sequence-to-sequence modeling where MTMOO problem can be represented by tenxual tokenization. To operate under such auto-regressive modeling, we introduce a Large Language Model-based surrogate model that first encodes a MTMOO instance and then decodes objective values of unseen decision variables. To ensure stability in training the proposed model, we propose a two-stage offline training strategy that operates as a synergy of supervised tuning and RL fine-tuning, which first exploits offline dataset to fit existing knowledge and then leverages RL to enhance model's generalization performance. Extensive empirical results on the CEC2019 benchmark demonstrate that Q-MetaSur not only outperforms representative surrogate baselines in objective approximation accuracy, but also helps underlying evolutionary algorithms achieve both desired optimization convergence and improved pareto optimality.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2025

Evolutionary System 2 Reasoning: An Empirical Proof

Machine intelligence marks the ultimate dream of making machines' intelligence comparable to human beings. While recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) show substantial specific skills for a wide array of downstream tasks, they more or less fall shorts in general intelligence. Following correlation between intelligence and system 2 reasoning (slow thinking), in this paper, we aim to answering a worthwhile research question: could machine intelligence such as LLMs be evolved to acquire reasoning ability (not specific skill) just like our human beings? To this end, we propose evolutionary reasoning optimization (ERO) framework which performs survival of the fittest over a population of LLMs to search for individual with strong reasoning ability. Given a reasoning task, ERO first initializes multiple LLMs as a population, after which an evolutionary strategy evolves the population to maximize quantified reasoning score of the best individual. Based on experiments on representative testsuites, we claim two surprising empirical discoveries: i) the latest LLMs such as GPT-5 still show limited system 2 reasoning ability; ii) with simple evolution-loop of ERO, a relatively weak model (Qwen-7B) could be enhanced to emerge powerful reasoning ability. Our project can be accessed at https://github.com/MetaEvo/ERO for reproduction needs.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2025

Learning Where, What and How to Transfer: A Multi-Role Reinforcement Learning Approach for Evolutionary Multitasking

Evolutionary multitasking (EMT) algorithms typically require tailored designs for knowledge transfer, in order to assure convergence and optimality in multitask optimization. In this paper, we explore designing a systematic and generalizable knowledge transfer policy through Reinforcement Learning. We first identify three major challenges: determining the task to transfer (where), the knowledge to be transferred (what) and the mechanism for the transfer (how). To address these challenges, we formulate a multi-role RL system where three (groups of) policy networks act as specialized agents: a task routing agent incorporates an attention-based similarity recognition module to determine source-target transfer pairs via attention scores; a knowledge control agent determines the proportion of elite solutions to transfer; and a group of strategy adaptation agents control transfer strength by dynamically controlling hyper-parameters in the underlying EMT framework. Through pre-training all network modules end-to-end over an augmented multitask problem distribution, a generalizable meta-policy is obtained. Comprehensive validation experiments show state-of-the-art performance of our method against representative baselines. Further in-depth analysis not only reveals the rationale behind our proposal but also provide insightful interpretations on what the system have learned.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2025

Instance Generation for Meta-Black-Box Optimization through Latent Space Reverse Engineering

To relieve intensive human-expertise required to design optimization algorithms, recent Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) researches leverage generalization strength of meta-learning to train neural network-based algorithm design policies over a predefined training problem set, which automates the adaptability of the low-level optimizers on unseen problem instances. Currently, a common training problem set choice in existing MetaBBOs is well-known benchmark suites CoCo-BBOB. Although such choice facilitates the MetaBBO's development, problem instances in CoCo-BBOB are more or less limited in diversity, raising the risk of overfitting of MetaBBOs, which might further results in poor generalization. In this paper, we propose an instance generation approach, termed as \textbf{LSRE}, which could generate diverse training problem instances for MetaBBOs to learn more generalizable policies. LSRE first trains an autoencoder which maps high-dimensional problem features into a 2-dimensional latent space. Uniform-grid sampling in this latent space leads to hidden representations of problem instances with sufficient diversity. By leveraging a genetic-programming approach to search function formulas with minimal L2-distance to these hidden representations, LSRE reverse engineers a diversified problem set, termed as \textbf{Diverse-BBO}. We validate the effectiveness of LSRE by training various MetaBBOs on Diverse-BBO and observe their generalization performances on either synthetic or realistic scenarios. Extensive experimental results underscore the superiority of Diverse-BBO to existing training set choices in MetaBBOs. Further ablation studies not only demonstrate the effectiveness of design choices in LSRE, but also reveal interesting insights on instance diversity and MetaBBO's generalization.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

DesignX: Human-Competitive Algorithm Designer for Black-Box Optimization

Designing effective black-box optimizers is hampered by limited problem-specific knowledge and manual control that spans months for almost every detail. In this paper, we present \textit{DesignX}, the first automated algorithm design framework that generates an effective optimizer specific to a given black-box optimization problem within seconds. Rooted in the first principles, we identify two key sub-tasks: 1) algorithm structure generation and 2) hyperparameter control. To enable systematic construction, a comprehensive modular algorithmic space is first built, embracing hundreds of algorithm components collected from decades of research. We then introduce a dual-agent reinforcement learning system that collaborates on structural and parametric design through a novel cooperative training objective, enabling large-scale meta-training across 10k diverse instances. Remarkably, through days of autonomous learning, the DesignX-generated optimizers continuously surpass human-crafted optimizers by orders of magnitude, either on synthetic testbed or on realistic optimization scenarios such as Protein-docking, AutoML and UAV path planning. Further in-depth analysis reveals DesignX's capability to discover non-trivial algorithm patterns beyond expert intuition, which, conversely, provides valuable design insights for the optimization community. We provide DesignX's Python project at~ https://github.com/MetaEvo/DesignX.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

MetaBox-v2: A Unified Benchmark Platform for Meta-Black-Box Optimization

Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) streamlines the automation of optimization algorithm design through meta-learning. It typically employs a bi-level structure: the meta-level policy undergoes meta-training to reduce the manual effort required in developing algorithms for low-level optimization tasks. The original MetaBox (2023) provided the first open-source framework for reinforcement learning-based single-objective MetaBBO. However, its relatively narrow scope no longer keep pace with the swift advancement in this field. In this paper, we introduce MetaBox-v2 (https://github.com/MetaEvo/MetaBox) as a milestone upgrade with four novel features: 1) a unified architecture supporting RL, evolutionary, and gradient-based approaches, by which we reproduce $23$ up-to-date baselines; 2) efficient parallelization schemes, which reduce the training/testing time by $10-40$x; 3) a comprehensive benchmark suite of $18$ synthetic/realistic tasks ($1900$+ instances) spanning single-objective, multi-objective, multi-model, and multi-task optimization scenarios; 4) plentiful and extensible interfaces for custom analysis/visualization and integrating to external optimization tools/benchmarks. To show the utility of MetaBox-v2, we carry out a systematic case study that evaluates the built-in baselines in terms of the optimization performance, generalization ability and learning efficiency. Valuable insights are concluded from thorough and detailed analysis for practitioners and those new to the field.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Meta-Black-Box-Optimization through Offline Q-function Learning

Recent progress in Meta-Black-Box-Optimization (MetaBBO) has demonstrated that using RL to learn a meta-level policy for dynamic algorithm configuration (DAC) over an optimization task distribution could significantly enhance the performance of the low-level BBO algorithm. However, the online learning paradigms in existing works makes the efficiency of MetaBBO problematic. To address this, we propose an offline learning-based MetaBBO framework in this paper, termed Q-Mamba, to attain both effectiveness and efficiency in MetaBBO. Specifically, we first transform DAC task into long-sequence decision process. This allows us further introduce an effective Q-function decomposition mechanism to reduce the learning difficulty within the intricate algorithm configuration space. Under this setting, we propose three novel designs to meta-learn DAC policy from offline data: we first propose a novel collection strategy for constructing offline DAC experiences dataset with balanced exploration and exploitation. We then establish a decomposition-based Q-loss that incorporates conservative Q-learning to promote stable offline learning from the offline dataset. To further improve the offline learning efficiency, we equip our work with a Mamba architecture which helps long-sequence learning effectiveness and efficiency by selective state model and hardware-aware parallel scan respectively. Through extensive benchmarking, we observe that Q-Mamba achieves competitive or even superior performance to prior online/offline baselines, while significantly improving the training efficiency of existing online baselines. We provide sourcecodes of Q-Mamba at https://github.com/MetaEvo/Q-Mamba.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2025

Toward Automated Algorithm Design: A Survey and Practical Guide to Meta-Black-Box-Optimization

In this survey, we introduce Meta-Black-Box-Optimization~(MetaBBO) as an emerging avenue within the Evolutionary Computation~(EC) community, which incorporates Meta-learning approaches to assist automated algorithm design. Despite the success of MetaBBO, the current literature provides insufficient summaries of its key aspects and lacks practical guidance for implementation. To bridge this gap, we offer a comprehensive review of recent advances in MetaBBO, providing an in-depth examination of its key developments. We begin with a unified definition of the MetaBBO paradigm, followed by a systematic taxonomy of various algorithm design tasks, including algorithm selection, algorithm configuration, solution manipulation, and algorithm generation. Further, we conceptually summarize different learning methodologies behind current MetaBBO works, including reinforcement learning, supervised learning, neuroevolution, and in-context learning with Large Language Models. A comprehensive evaluation of the latest representative MetaBBO methods is then carried out, alongside an experimental analysis of their optimization performance, computational efficiency, and generalization ability. Based on the evaluation results, we meticulously identify a set of core designs that enhance the generalization and learning effectiveness of MetaBBO. Finally, we outline the vision for the field by providing insight into the latest trends and potential future directions. Relevant literature will be continuously collected and updated at https://github.com/MetaEvo/Awesome-MetaBBO.

cs.NE↗