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Heuristic orientation adjustment for better exploration in multi-objective optimization

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Abstract

Decomposition strategy which employs predefined subproblem framework and reference vectors has significant contribution in multi-objective optimization, and it can enhance local convergence as well as global diversity. However, the fixed exploring directions sacrifice flexibility and adaptability; therefore, extra reference adaptations should be considered under different shapes of the Pareto front. In this paper, a population-based heuristic orientation generating approach is presented to build a dynamic decomposition. The novel approach replaces the exhaustive reference distribution with reduced and partial orientations clustered within potential areas and provides flexible and scalable instructions for better exploration. Numerical experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method is compatible with both regular Pareto fronts and irregular cases and maintains outperformance or competitive performance compared to some state-of-the-art multi-objective approaches and adaptive-based algorithms. Moreover, the novel strategy presents more independence on subproblem aggregations and provides an autonomous evolving branch in decomposition-based researches.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the China Scholarship Council, 201706260064, National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61503287 & 71771176, NUSRI China Jiangsu Provincial Grant BK20150386 & BE2016077, and Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. LY18F030010. The authors would like to thank Abigail Martin for the proofreading.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Anqi Pan, Lei Wang & Qidi Wu

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Anqi Pan & Hongliang Ren

  3. Sino-Germany College of Applied Sciences, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Weian Guo

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  1. Anqi Pan
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Correspondence to Lei Wang.

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Pan, A., Wang, L., Guo, W. et al. Heuristic orientation adjustment for better exploration in multi-objective optimization. Neural Comput & Applic 32, 4757–4771 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-018-3848-8

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