Evolutionary multi-task optimization with hybrid knowledge transfer strategy

Abstract

As an emerging research paradigm in the field of evolutionary computation, evolutionary multi-task optimization (EMTO) has received an increasing amount of attention due to its capability in concurrently solving multiple related optimization tasks. In EMTO, without any prior knowledge about the complementarity between different tasks, the task relatedness is mainly captured dynamically through the evolving population. However, how to transfer the knowledge across tasks in accordance with different degrees of relatedness as the search proceeds has received little visibility. To address this issue and further enhance the performance of EMTOs, this paper proposes a hybrid knowledge transfer (HKT) strategy. In HKT, a population distribution-based measurement (PDM) technique is designed to evaluate the task relatedness based on the distribution characteristics of the evolving population, and then a multi-knowledge transfer (MKT) mechanism is employed to conduct multiple strategies of knowledge transfer according to the degree of relatedness between tasks. By incorporating the HKT strategy into EMTO, the resultant algorithmic framework, termed EMTO–HKT, is presented. The experimental results on the single-objective multi-task optimization test suite demonstrate the superiority of EMTO–HKT compared with other state-of-the-art EMTO algorithms.