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Learning-driven Evolutionary Optimization

Overview

Integrating learning and transfer into evolutionary search to improve adaptation, convergence, and robustness in dynamic and high-dimensional optimization.

Key Questions

  • How can learning mechanisms be integrated into evolutionary algorithms without introducing unnecessary computational overhead?
  • What kinds of knowledge should be transferred between optimization phases, and how can negative transfer be avoided?
  • How can learned models generalize across problem instances and changing environments?

Our Contributions

  • Developed transfer-learning frameworks for dynamic multiobjective optimization that reuse historical knowledge to accelerate convergence
  • Introduced knee point-based imbalanced transfer learning to handle distribution mismatch in changing environments
  • Proposed spatial-temporal knowledge transfer for dynamic constrained optimization problems

Recommended Papers

Min Jiang, Zhongqiang Huang, Liming Qiu, Wenzhen Huang, Gary G. Yen · IEEE TEVC 2018
Introduces transfer learning for dynamic multiobjective optimization, so search can reuse prior environments.
Min JIANG and Zhenzhong WANG and Haokai HONG and Gary G. YEN · IEEE TEVC 2020
Uses knee-point-aware transfer to avoid negative transfer when fronts shift unevenly.
Zhenzhong Wang and Dejun Xu and Min Jiang and Kay Chen Tan · IEEE TEVC 2024
Qiuzhen Lin, Yulong Ye, Lijia Ma, Min Jiang, Kay Chen Tan · IEEE TSMC 2024

Recent Work

Min Jiang, Huolong Wu, Zhenzhong Wang, Gary G. Yen · IEEE TETCI 2026
Recasts dynamic multiobjective optimization as a prompt-guided time-series prediction problem and shows that large language models can generate competitive solutions.

Open Problems

  • Developing theoretically grounded transfer criteria that can determine when and what to transfer
  • Scaling learning-driven approaches to high-dimensional and many-objective problems
  • Understanding the interaction between learning mechanisms and population diversity

Prospective Student Projects

  • Transfer learning for many-objective optimization in dynamic environments
  • Meta-learning approaches for rapid adaptation to new optimization problems
  • Learning-based constraint handling in dynamic constrained optimization

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