In this paper, we borrow the large language model (LLM) ChatGPT-3.5 to automatically and quickly design a new metaheuristic algorithm (MA) with only a small amount of input. The novel animal-inspired MA named zoological search optimization (ZSO) draws inspiration from the collective behaviors of animals for solving continuous optimization problems. Specifically, the basic ZSO algorithm involves two search operators: the prey-predator interaction operator and the social flocking operator to balance exploration and exploitation well. Besides, the standard prompt engineering framework CRISPE (i.e., Capacity and Role, Insight, Statement, Personality, and Experiment) is responsible for the specific prompt design. Furthermore, we designed four variants of the ZSO algorithm with slight human-interacted adjustment. In numerical experiments, we comprehensively investigate the performance of ZSO-derived algorithms on CEC2014 benchmark functions, CEC2022 benchmark functions, and six engineering optimization problems. 20 popular and state-of-the-art MAs are employed as competitors. The experimental results and statistical analysis confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of ZSO-derived algorithms. At the end of this paper, we explore the prospects for the development of the metaheuristics community under the LLM era.
This paper introduces a novel metaheuristic algorithm, known as the efficient multiplayer battle game optimizer (EMBGO), specifically designed for addressing complex numerical optimization tasks. The motivation behind this research stems from the need to rectify identified shortcomings in the original MBGO, particularly in search operators during the movement phase, as revealed through ablation experiments. EMBGO mitigates these limitations by integrating the movement and battle phases to simplify the original optimization framework and improve search efficiency. Besides, two efficient search operators: differential mutation and L\'evy flight are introduced to increase the diversity of the population. To evaluate the performance of EMBGO comprehensively and fairly, numerical experiments are conducted on benchmark functions such as CEC2017, CEC2020, and CEC2022, as well as engineering problems. Twelve well-established MA approaches serve as competitor algorithms for comparison. Furthermore, we apply the proposed EMBGO to the complex adversarial robust neural architecture search (ARNAS) tasks and explore its robustness and scalability. The experimental results and statistical analyses confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of EMBGO across various optimization tasks. As a potential optimization technique, EMBGO holds promise for diverse applications in real-world problems and deep learning scenarios. The source code of EMBGO is made available in \url{https://github.com/RuiZhong961230/EMBGO}.
Various popular multiplayer battle royale games share a lot of common elements. Drawing from our observations, we summarized these shared characteristics and subsequently proposed a novel heuristic algorithm named multiplayer battle game-inspired optimizer (MBGO). The proposed MBGO streamlines mainstream multiplayer battle royale games into two discrete phases: movement and battle. Specifically, the movement phase incorporates the principles of commonly encountered ``safe zones'' to incentivize participants to relocate to areas with a higher survival potential. The battle phase simulates a range of strategies adopted by players in various situations to enhance the diversity of the population. To evaluate and analyze the performance of the proposed MBGO, we executed it alongside eight other algorithms, including three classics and five latest ones, across multiple diverse dimensions within the CEC2017 and CEC2020 benchmark functions. In addition, we employed several industrial design problems to evaluate the scalability and practicality of the proposed MBGO. The results of the statistical analysis reveal that the novel MBGO demonstrates significant competitiveness, excelling not only in convergence speed, but also in achieving high levels of convergence accuracy across both benchmark functions and real-world problems.
In this paper, we propose a novel method to estimate the elite individual to accelerate the convergence of optimization. Inspired by the Bayesian Optimization Algorithm (BOA), the Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) is applied to approximate the fitness landscape of original problems based on every generation of optimization. And simple but efficient $\epsilon$-greedy acquisition function is employed to find a promising solution in the surrogate model. Proximity Optimal Principle (POP) states that well-performed solutions have a similar structure, and there is a high probability of better solutions existing around the elite individual. Based on this hypothesis, in each generation of optimization, we replace the worst individual in Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) with the elite individual to participate in the evolution process. To illustrate the scalability of our proposal, we combine our proposal with the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Differential Evolution (DE), and CMA-ES. Experimental results in CEC2013 benchmark functions show our proposal has a broad prospect to estimate the elite individual and accelerate the convergence of optimization.
In this paper, we propose a two-stage optimization strategy for solving the Large-scale Traveling Salesman Problems (LSTSPs) named CCPNRL-GA. First, we hypothesize that the participation of a well-performed individual as an elite can accelerate the convergence of optimization. Based on this hypothesis, in the first stage, we cluster the cities and decompose the LSTSPs into multiple subcomponents, and each subcomponent is optimized with a reusable Pointer Network (PtrNet). After subcomponents optimization, we combine all sub-tours to form a valid solution, this solution joins the second stage of optimization with GA. We validate the performance of our proposal on 10 LSTSPs and compare it with traditional EAs. Experimental results show that the participation of an elite individual can greatly accelerate the optimization of LSTSPs, and our proposal has broad prospects for dealing with LSTSPs.
Many optimization problems suffer from noise, and nonlinearity check-based decomposition methods (e.g. Differential Grouping) will completely fail to detect the interactions between variables in multiplicative noisy environments, thus, it is difficult to decompose the large-scale optimization problems (LSOPs) in noisy environments. In this paper, we propose an automatic Random Grouping (aRG), which does not need any explicit hyperparameter specified by users. Simulation experiments and mathematical analysis show that aRG can detect the interactions between variables without the fitness landscape knowledge, and the sub-problems decomposed by aRG have smaller scales, which is easier for EAs to optimize. Based on the cooperative coevolution (CC) framework, we introduce an advanced optimizer named Modified Differential Evolution with Distance-based Selection (MDE-DS) to enhance the search ability in noisy environments. Compared with canonical DE, the parameter self-adaptation, the balance between diversification and intensification, and the distance-based probability selection endow MDE-DS with stronger ability in exploration and exploitation. To evaluate the performance of our proposal, we design $500$-D and $1000$-D problems with various separability in noisy environments based on the CEC2013 LSGO Suite. Numerical experiments show that our proposal has broad prospects to solve LSOPs in noisy environments and can be easily extended to higher-dimensional problems.
In this paper, we propose a simple strategy for estimating the convergence point approximately by averaging the elite sub-population. Based on this idea, we derive two methods, which are ordinary averaging strategy, and weighted averaging strategy. We also design a Gaussian sampling operator with the mean of the estimated convergence point with a certain standard deviation. This operator is combined with the traditional differential evolution algorithm (DE) to accelerate the convergence. Numerical experiments show that our proposal can accelerate the DE on most functions of 28 low-dimensional test functions on the CEC2013 Suite, and our proposal can easily be extended to combine with other population-based evolutionary algorithms with a simple modification.
In this paper, we propose a variable grouping method based on cooperative coevolution for large-scale multi-objective problems (LSMOPs), named Linkage Measurement Minimization (LMM). And for the sub-problem optimization stage, a hybrid NSGA-II with a Gaussian sampling operator based on an estimated convergence point is proposed. In the variable grouping stage, according to our previous research, we treat the variable grouping problem as a combinatorial optimization problem, and the linkage measurement function is designed based on linkage identification by the nonlinearity check on real code (LINC-R). We extend this variable grouping method to LSMOPs. In the sub-problem optimization stage, we hypothesize that there is a higher probability of existing better solutions around the Pareto Front (PF). Based on this hypothesis, we estimate a convergence point at every generation of optimization and perform Gaussian sampling around the convergence point. The samples with good objective value will participate in the optimization as elites. Numerical experiments show that our variable grouping method is better than some popular variable grouping methods, and hybrid NSGA-II has broad prospects for multi-objective problem optimization.
Rich user behavior information is of great importance for capturing and understanding user interest in click-through rate (CTR) prediction. To improve the richness, collecting long-term behaviors becomes a typical approach in academy and industry but at the cost of increasing online storage and latency. Recently, researchers have proposed several approaches to shorten long-term behavior sequence and then model user interests. These approaches reduce online cost efficiently but do not well handle the noisy information in long-term user behavior, which may deteriorate the performance of CTR prediction significantly. To obtain better cost/performance trade-off, we propose a novel Adversarial Filtering Model (ADFM) to model long-term user behavior. ADFM uses a hierarchical aggregation representation to compress raw behavior sequence and then learns to remove useless behavior information with an adversarial filtering mechanism. The selected user behaviors are fed into interest extraction module for CTR prediction. Experimental results on public datasets and industrial dataset demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models.