Jun Zhang

Hanyang University

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 g...

Knowledge transfer (KT) is crucial for optimizing tasks in evolutionary multitask optimization (EMTO). However, most existing KT methods can only achieve superficial KT but lack the ability to deeply mine the similarities or relationships among different tasks. This limitation may result in negative transfer, thereby degrading the KT performance. A...

UAVs are increasingly becoming vital tools in various wireless communication applications including internet of things (IoT) and sensor networks, thanks to their rapid and agile non-terrestrial mobility. Despite recent research, planning three-dimensional (3D) UAV trajectories over a continuous temporal-spatial domain remains challenging due to the...

Tourism is an important industry sector that requires tour companies to plan multiple routes for different tour groups, which is called tour multi-route planning. This paper focuses on tour multi-route planning, which can improve the economic benefit and allocation efficiency of tour resources. The main contributions of this paper are threefold. Fi...

How to simultaneously locate multiple global peaks and achieve certain accuracy on the found peaks are two key challenges in solving multimodal optimization problems (MMOPs). In this paper, a landscape-aware differential evolution (LADE) algorithm is proposed for MMOPs, which utilizes landscape knowledge to maintain sufficient diversity and provide...

Many real-world combinatorial optimization problems are defined on networks, such as road networks and social networks, etc. Due to the connectivity nature of networks, decision variables in such problems are usually coupled with each other, and the variables are also closely related to the characteristics of the local subnetwork to which they belo...

Evolutionary algorithms, such as differential evolution, excel in solving real-parameter optimization challenges. However, the effectiveness of a single algorithm varies across different problem instances, necessitating considerable efforts in algorithm selection or configuration. This article aims to address the limitation by leveraging the comple...

The emergence of networked systems in various fields brings many complex distributed optimization problems, where multiple agents in the system need to optimize a global objective cooperatively when they only have local information. In this work, we take advantage of the intrinsic parallelism of evolutionary computation to address network-based dis...

Electroencephalogram (EEG) plays a significant role in emotion recognition because it contains abundant information. However, due to the highly correlated EEG channels, a lot of redundant EEG features exist, which not only potentially degrade the emotion recognition accuracy, but also bring high computational cost. To address this challenge, this p...

Natural image matting has garnered increasing attention in various computer vision applications. The matting problem aims to find the optimal foreground/background (F/B) color pair for each unknown pixel, and thus obtain an alpha matte indicating the opacity of the foreground object. This problem is typically modeled as a large-scale pixel pair com...

Recently, evolutionary computation (EC) has experienced significant advancements due to the integration of machine learning, distributed computing, and big data technologies. These developments have led to new research avenues in EC, such as distributed EC and surrogate-assisted EC. While these advancements have greatly enhanced the performance and...

EA, such as the genetic algorithm (GA), offer an elegant way to handle combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). However, limited by expertise and resources, most users lack the capability to implement evolutionary algorithms (EAs) for solving COPs. An intuitive and promising solution is to outsource evolutionary operations to a cloud server, how...

As a challenging research topic in evolutionary multitask optimization (EMTO), evolutionary many-task optimization (EMaTO) aims at solving more than three tasks simultaneously. The design of the EMaTO algorithm generally needs to consider two major open issues, which are how to obtain useful knowledge from similar source tasks and how to effectivel...

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have achieved effective performance in solving complex data-driven optimization problems. In the Internet of Things environment, the data of many problems are collected and processed in distributed network nodes and cannot be transmitted. As each local node can only access and build surrogate model...

Protein structure prediction (PSP) is an important scientific problem because it helps humans to understand how proteins perform their biological functions. This paper models the PSP problem as a multi-objective optimization problem with three fast and accurate knowledge-based energy functions. This way, using evolutionary computation (EC)-based ar...

Distributed optimization has attracted lots of attention in recent years. Thanks to the intrinsic parallelism and great search capacity, evolutionary computation (EC) has the potential for black-box and non-convex distributed optimization. However, due to the decentralization of local objective functions, it is challenging to optimize the global ob...

Evolutionary multitasking(EMT), which conducts evolutionary research on multiple tasks simultaneously, is an emerging research topic in the computation intelligence community. It aims to enhance the convergence characteristics by simultaneously conducting evolutionary research on multiple tasks, thereby facilitating knowledge transfer among tasks a...

Symbolic regression, a multifaceted optimization challenge involving the refinement of both structural components and coefficients, has gained significant research interest in recent years. The Equation Learner (EQL), a neural network designed to optimize both equation structure and coefficients through gradient-based optimization algorithms, has e...

Crowdsourcing utilizes the crowd intelligence for pervasive data sensing and processing. When the processing task is a decision-making and optimization problem, the objective is evaluated based on sensed data, which is defined as crowdsourcing-based distributed optimization (CrowdDO). As evolutionary computation (EC) is a powerful technique for bla...

The Kriging model has been widely used in regression-based surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) for expensive multiobjective optimization by using one model to approximate one objective, and the fusion of all the models forms the fitness surrogate. However, when tackling expensive many-objective optimization problems, too many models...

Although knowledge transfer methods are developed for many-task optimization problems, they tend to utilize solutions from a single task for knowledge transfer. Indeed, there are usually multiple relevant source tasks with commonality. Multi-source data fusion can capture complementary knowledge of distinct source tasks to better assist the optimiz...

When solving optimization problems with expensive or implicit objective functions, evolutionary algorithms commonly utilize surrogate models as cost-effective substitutes for evaluation. This category of algorithms is referred to as data-driven evolutionary algorithms (DDEAs). However, when constructing surrogate models, existing studies rely on th...

Dynamic multiobjective optimization poses great challenges to evolutionary algorithms due to the change of optimal solutions or Pareto front with time. Learning-based methods are popular to extract the changing pattern of optimal solutions for predicting new solutions. They tend to use all variables as features (i.e., inputs) to build prediction mo...

In dynamic multiobjective optimization, the Pareto front (PF) or Pareto set varies over time as the problem environment changes. In such scenarios, optimization algorithms are required to efficiently find and continuously track a set of Pareto-optimal and diverse solutions. However, existing algorithms often result in the imbalanced approximation o...

Constraint handling is a core part when using surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) to solve expensive constrained optimization problems (ECOPs). However, most existing SAEAs for ECOPs train a surrogate for each constraint. With the number of constraints increasing, the training burden of surrogates becomes heavy and the efficiency of...

As a newly emerged evolutionary algorithm, tensorial evolution (TE) has shown promising performance in solving spatial optimization problems owing to its tensorial representation and tensorial evolutionary patterns. TE algorithm sequentially performed different tensorial evolutionary operations on a single individual or pairs of individuals in a po...

Feature selection is a crucial process in data science that involves selecting the most effective subset of features. Evolutionary computation (EC) is one of the most commonly-used feature selection techniques and has demonstrated good performance, which can help find the suitable feature subset based on training data and fitness information. Howev...

In recent years, the m ulti-task learning for k nowledge graph-based r ecommender system, termed MKR, has shown its promising performance and has attracted increasing interest, because a recommendation task and a knowledge graph embedding (KGE) task can help each other to improve the recommendation. However, MKR still has two difficult issues...

The field of visual search has gained significant attention recently, particularly in the context of web search engines and e-commerce product search platforms. However, the abundance of web images presents a challenge for modern image retrieval systems, as they need to find both relevant and diverse images that maximize users’ satisfaction. In res...

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have become a popular tool to solve expensive optimization problems and have been gradually used to deal with expensive constraints. To handle inequality expensive constraints, existing SAEAs need both the information of constraint violation and satisfaction to construct surrogate models for constr...

Cooperative heterogeneous multirobot systems have attracted increasing attention in recent years. They use multiple heterogeneous robots to execute complex tasks in a coordinated way. The allocation of heterogeneous robots to cooperative tasks is a significant and challenging optimization problem. However, little work has gone into scheduling large...

In a bike-sharing system, the user route planning problem (URPP) is significant because it helps users to plan the route and to choose appropriate intermediate stations to transfer bikes, so as to reduce riding costs. To efficiently solve the URPP, this paper models it as a discrete optimization problem with constraints and proposes a knowledge lea...

Local search has been regarded as a promising technique in multimodal algorithms to refine the accuracy of found multiple optima. However, how to execute the local search operations precisely on the found global optima and avoid the meaningless local search operations on local optima or found similar areas is still a challenge. In this paper, we pr...

Evolutionary multitask optimization is an emerging research topic that aims to solve multiple tasks simultaneously. A general challenge in solving multitask optimization problems (MTOPs) is how to effectively transfer common knowledge between/among tasks. However, knowledge transfer in existing algorithms generally has two limitations. First, knowl...

Travel time estimation is a crucial task in practical transportation applications, while providing the reliability of estimation is important in many working scenarios. Most existing studies do not consider the dynamics of traffic status for different road segments in real time, thus yielding unsatisfactory results. To address the problem, we propo...

The rapid development of parallel and distributed computing paradigms has brought about great revolution in computing. Thanks to the intrinsic parallelism of evolutionary computation (EC), it is natural to implement EC on parallel and distributed computing systems. On the one hand, the computing power provided by parallel computing systems can sign...

Crowdsourcing is an emerging computing paradigm that takes advantage of the intelligence of a crowd to solve complex problems effectively. Besides collecting and processing data, it is also a great demand for the crowd to conduct optimization. Inspired by this, this paper intends to introduce crowdsourcing into evolutionary computation (EC) to prop...

Trajectory planning is a crucial task in designing the navigation systems of automatic underwater vehicles (AUVs). Due to the complexity of underwater environments, decision makers may hope to obtain multiple alternative trajectories in order to select the best. This paper focuses on the multiple-trajectory planning (MTP) problem, which is a new to...

High-dimensional optimization problems are increasingly pervasive in real-world applications nowadays and become harder and harder to optimize due to increasingly interacting variables. To tackle such problems effectively, this paper designs a random elite ensemble learning swarm optimizer (REELSO) by taking inspiration from human observational lea...

Recently, evolutionary computation (EC) has been promoted by machine learning, distributed computing, and big data technologies, resulting in new research directions of EC like distributed EC and surrogate-assisted EC. These advances have significantly improved the performance and the application scope of EC, but also trigger privacy leakages, such...

The evolutionary multitask optimization (EMTO) algorithm is a promising approach to solve many-task optimization problems (MaTOPs), in which similarity measurement and knowledge transfer (KT) are two key issues. Many existing EMTO algorithms estimate the similarity of population distribution to select a set of similar tasks and then perform KT by s...

Sudoku puzzles are not only popular intellectual games but also NP-hard combinatorial problems related to various real-world applications, which have attracted much attention worldwide. Although many efficient tools, such as evolutionary computation (EC) algorithms, have been proposed for solving Sudoku puzzles, they still face great challenges wit...

Collective decision-making problems consisting of individual decisions are commonly seen in social applications. In this article, the vehicle energy station distribution problem (VESDP) is considered, which is modeled as a network-based collective decision-making problem fulfilling consumers’ requirements by arranging the distribution of energy sta...

Multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are popular for executing submarine missions, which involve multiple targets distributed in a large and complex underwater environment. The path planning of multiple AUVs is a significant and challenging problem, which determines the location of surface points for AUV launch and plans the paths of AUVs...

In high dimensional environment, the interaction among particles significantly affects their movements in searching the vast solution space and thus plays a vital role in assisting particle swarm optimization (PSO) to attain good performance. To this end, this paper designs a random contrastive interaction (RCI) strategy for PSO, resulting in RCI-P...

Evolutionary computation (EC) is a kind of meta-heuristic algorithm that takes inspiration from natural evolution and swarm intelligence behaviors. In the EC algorithm, there is a huge amount of data generated during the evolutionary process. These data reflect the evolutionary behavior and therefore mining and utilizing these data can obtain promi...

Handling conflicting objectives and finding multiple Pareto optimal solutions are two challenging issues in solving multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs). Inspired by the efficiency of multitask optimization (MTO) in finding multiple optimal solutions of multitask optimization problem (MTOP), we propose to treat MOP as a MTOP and solve it by...

Distributed database system (DDBS) technology has shown its advantages with respect to query processing efficiency, scalability, and reliability. Moreover, by partitioning attributes of sensitive associations into different fragments, DDBSs can be used to protect data privacy. However, it is complex to design a DDBS when one has to optimize privacy...

Density clustering has shown advantages over other types of clustering methods for processing arbitrarily shaped datasets. In recent years, extensive research efforts has been made on the improvements of DBSCAN or the algorithms incorporating the concept of density peaks. However, these previous studies remain the problems of being sensitive to the...

Cooperative coevolutionary algorithms are popular to solve large-scale dynamic optimization problems via divide-and-conquer mechanisms. Their performance depends on how decision variables are grouped and how changing optima are tracked. However, existing decomposition methods are computationally expensive, resulting in limitations under dynamic var...

The rapid development of online social networks (OSNs) has facilitated people to express opinions and share information. To optimize the utility of information dissemination in OSNs, problems such as influence maximization have received increasing attention in recent years. However, not only positive information but also negative information is spr...