Near-Tight Runtime Guarantees for Many-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms

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Abstract

Despite significant progress in the field of mathematical runtime analysis of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs), the performance of MOEAs on discrete many-objective problems is little understood. In particular, the few existing bounds for the SEMO, global SEMO, and SMS-EMOA algorithms on classic benchmarks are all roughly quadratic in the size of the Pareto front. In this work, we prove near-tight runtime guarantees for these three algorithms on the four most common benchmark problems OneMinMax, CountingOnesCountingZeros, LeadingOnesTrailingZeros, and OneJumpZeroJump, and this for arbitrary numbers of objectives. Our bounds depend only linearly on the Pareto front size, showing that these MOEAs on these benchmarks cope much better with many objectives than what previous works suggested. Our bounds are tight apart from small polynomial factors in the number of objectives and length of bitstrings. This is the first time that such tight bounds are proven for many-objective uses of these MOEAs. While it is known that such results cannot hold for the NSGA-II, we do show that our bounds, via a recent structural result, transfer to the NSGA-III algorithm.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationParallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XVIII - 18th International Conference, PPSN 2024, Proceedings
EditorsMichael Affenzeller, Stephan M. Winkler, Anna V. Kononova, Thomas Bäck, Heike Trautmann, Tea Tušar, Penousal Machado
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages153-168
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9783031700842
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2024
Event18th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2024 - Hagenberg, Austria
Duration: 14 Sept 202418 Sept 2024

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume15151 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference18th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2024
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityHagenberg
Period14/09/2418/09/24

Keywords

  • NSGA
  • SMS-EMOA
  • evolutionary multi-objective optimization
  • runtime analysis
  • theory

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