Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization Driven by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

• Published in: IEEE transactions on cybernetics Vol. 51; no. 6; pp. 3129 - 3142
• Main Authors: He, Cheng, Huang, Shihua, Cheng, Ran, Tan, Kay Chen, Jin, Yaochu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.06.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptation models; Computational modeling; Deep learning; evolutionary algorithm; Evolutionary algorithms; Evolutionary computation; Generative adversarial networks; generative adversarial networks (GANs); Genetic algorithms; Machine learning; multiobjective optimization; Multiple objective analysis; Optimization; Training; Training data
• DOI: 10.1109/TCYB.2020.2985081
• ISSN: 2168-2267; 2168-2275

Recently, increasing works have been proposed to drive evolutionary algorithms using machine-learning models. Usually, the performance of such model-based evolutionary algorithms is highly dependent on the training qualities of the adopted models. Since it usually requires a certain amount of data (i.e., the candidate solutions generated by the algorithms) for model training, the performance deteriorates rapidly with the increase of the problem scales due to the curse of dimensionality. To address this issue, we propose a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm driven by the generative adversarial networks (GANs). At each generation of the proposed algorithm, the parent solutions are first classified into real and fake samples to train the GANs; then the offspring solutions are sampled by the trained GANs. Thanks to the powerful generative ability of the GANs, our proposed algorithm is capable of generating promising offspring solutions in high-dimensional decision space with limited training data. The proposed algorithm is tested on ten benchmark problems with up to 200 decision variables. The experimental results on these test problems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.