An Initial Investigation of Data-Lean Transfer Evolutionary Optimization with Probabilistic Priors

Abstract

Transfer evolutionary optimization (TrEO) has emerged as a computational paradigm to leverage related problem-solving information from various source tasks to boost convergence rates in a target task. State-of-the-art Tr EO algorithms have utilized a source-target similarity capture method with probabilistic priors that grants the ability to reduce negative transfers. A recent work makes use of an additional solution representation learning module to induce high ordinal correlation between source and target objective functions through source-to-target search space mappings, with the aim of promoting positive transfers between them. However, current implementations of this approach are found to be data-intensive - calling for all generated source data to be cached - leading to high storage costs in practice. As an alternative, this paper investigates the feasibility of a data-lean variant of the aforesaid approach, labeled as (1, G)-TrEO, in which only the first and final (Gth) generations of source data are used for solution representation learning and transfer. We conduct experimental analyses of (1, G)-TrEO using multi-objective benchmark functions as well as a practical example in vehicle crashworthiness design. Our results show that a simple data-lean transfer optimizer is able to achieve competitive performance. While this paper presents a first investigation of (1, G)-TrEO, we hope that the findings would inspire future forms of data-lean TrEO algorithms.