Most existing multiobjetive evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) implicitly assume that each objective function can be evaluated within the same period of time. Typically. this is untenable in many real-world optimization scenarios where evaluation of dif
ferent objectives involves different computer simulations or physical experiments with distinct time complexity. To address this issue, a transfer learning scheme based on surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) is proposed, in which a co-surrogate is adopted to model the functional relationship between the fast and slow objective functions and a transferable instance selection method is introduced to acquire useful knowledge from the search process of the fast objective. Our experimental results on DTLZ and UF test suites demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is competitive for solving bi-objective optimization where objectives have non-uniform evaluation times.
Data-driven optimization has found many successful applications in the real world and received increased attention in the field of evolutionary optimization. Most existing algorithms assume that the data used for optimization is always available on a
central server for construction of surrogates. This assumption, however, may fail to hold when the data must be collected in a distributed way and is subject to privacy restrictions. This paper aims to propose a federated data-driven evolutionary multi-/many-objective optimization algorithm. To this end, we leverage federated learning for surrogate construction so that multiple clients collaboratively train a radial-basis-function-network as the global surrogate. Then a new federated acquisition function is proposed for the central server to approximate the objective values using the global surrogate and estimate the uncertainty level of the approximated objective values based on the local models. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified on a series of multi/many-objective benchmark problems by comparing it with two state-of-the-art surrogate-assisted multi-objective evolutionary algorithms.
Image clustering is a particularly challenging computer vision task, which aims to generate annotations without human supervision. Recent advances focus on the use of self-supervised learning strategies in image clustering, by first learning valuable
semantics and then clustering the image representations. These multiple-phase algorithms, however, increase the computational time and their final performance is reliant on the first stage. By extending the self-supervised approach, we propose a novel single-phase clustering method that simultaneously learns meaningful representations and assigns the corresponding annotations. This is achieved by integrating a discrete representation into the self-supervised paradigm through a classifier net. Specifically, the proposed clustering objective employs mutual information, and maximizes the dependency between the integrated discrete representation and a discrete probability distribution. The discrete probability distribution is derived though the self-supervised process by comparing the learnt latent representation with a set of trainable prototypes. To enhance the learning performance of the classifier, we jointly apply the mutual information across multi-crop views. Our empirical results show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art techniques with the average accuracy of 89.1% and 49.0%, respectively, on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100/20 datasets. Finally, the proposed method also demonstrates attractive robustness to parameter settings, making it ready to be applicable to other datasets.
Data-driven evolutionary optimization has witnessed great success in solving complex real-world optimization problems. However, existing data-driven optimization algorithms require that all data are centrally stored, which is not always practical and
may be vulnerable to privacy leakage and security threats if the data must be collected from different devices. To address the above issue, this paper proposes a federated data-driven evolutionary optimization framework that is able to perform data driven optimization when the data is distributed on multiple devices. On the basis of federated learning, a sorted model aggregation method is developed for aggregating local surrogates based on radial-basis-function networks. In addition, a federated surrogate management strategy is suggested by designing an acquisition function that takes into account the information of both the global and local surrogate models. Empirical studies on a set of widely used benchmark functions in the presence of various data distributions demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Many existing deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples that are imperceptible to humans. To address this issue, various methods have been proposed to design network architectures that are robust to one particular type of adversaria
l attacks. It is practically impossible, however, to predict beforehand which type of attacks a machine learn model may suffer from. To address this challenge, we propose to search for deep neural architectures that are robust to five types of well-known adversarial attacks using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. To reduce the computational cost, a normalized error rate of a randomly chosen attack is calculated as the robustness for each newly generated neural architecture at each generation. All non-dominated network architectures obtained by the proposed method are then fully trained against randomly chosen adversarial attacks and tested on two widely used datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of optimized neural architectures found by the proposed approach over state-of-the-art networks that are widely used in the literature in terms of the classification accuracy under different adversarial attacks.
Image clustering has recently attracted significant attention due to the increased availability of unlabelled datasets. The efficiency of traditional clustering algorithms heavily depends on the distance functions used and the dimensionality of the f
eatures. Therefore, performance degradation is often observed when tackling either unprocessed images or high-dimensional features extracted from processed images. To deal with these challenges, we propose a deep clustering framework consisting of a modified generative adversarial network (GAN) and an auxiliary classifier. The modification employs Sobel operations prior to the discriminator of the GAN to enhance the separability of the learned features. The discriminator is then leveraged to generate representations as the input to an auxiliary classifier. An adaptive objective function is utilised to train the auxiliary classifier for clustering the representations, aiming to increase the robustness by minimizing the divergence of multiple representations generated by the discriminator. The auxiliary classifier is implemented with a group of multiple cluster-heads, where a tolerance hyper-parameter is used to tackle imbalanced data. Our results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art clustering methods on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, and is competitive on the STL10 and MNIST datasets.
The performance of a deep neural network is heavily dependent on its architecture and various neural architecture search strategies have been developed for automated network architecture design. Recently, evolutionary neural architecture search (ENAS
) has received increasing attention due to the attractive global optimization capability of evolutionary algorithms. However, ENAS suffers from extremely high computation costs because a large number of performance evaluations is usually required in evolutionary optimization and training deep neural networks is itself computationally very intensive. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new evolutionary framework for fast ENAS based on directed acyclic graph, in which parents are randomly sampled and trained on each mini-batch of training data. In addition, a node inheritance strategy is adopted to generate offspring individuals and their fitness is directly evaluated without training. To enhance the feature processing capability of the evolved neural networks, we also encode a channel attention mechanism in the search space. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on the widely used datasets, in comparison with 26 state-of-the-art peer algorithms. Our experimental results show the proposed algorithm is not only computationally much more efficiently, but also highly competitive in learning performance.
Polychronous neural groups are effective structures for the recognition of precise spike-timing patterns but the detection method is an inefficient multi-stage brute force process that works off-line on pre-recorded simulation data. This work present
s a new model of polychronous patterns that can capture precise sequences of spikes directly in the neural simulation. In this scheme, each neuron is assigned a randomized code that is used to tag the post-synaptic neurons whenever a spike is transmitted. This creates a polychronous code that preserves the order of pre-synaptic activity and can be registered in a hash table when the post-synaptic neuron spikes. A polychronous code is a sub-component of a polychronous group that will occur, along with others, when the group is active. We demonstrate the representational and pattern recognition ability of polychronous codes on a direction selective visual task involving moving bars that is typical of a computation performed by simple cells in the cortex. The computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm far exceeds existing polychronous group detection methods and is well suited for online detection.
