Neural Network-Based Knowledge Transfer for Multitask Optimization

Knowledge transfer (KT) is crucial for optimizing tasks in evolutionary multitask optimization (EMTO). However, most existing KT methods can only achieve superficial KT but lack the ability to deeply mine the similarities or relationships among different tasks. This limitation may result in negative transfer, thereby degrading the KT performance. As the KT efficiency strongly depends on the similarities of tasks, this article proposes a neural network (NN)-based KT (NNKT) method to analyze the similarities of tasks and obtain the transfer models for information prediction between different tasks for high-quality KT. First, NNKT collects and pairs the solutions of multiple tasks and trains the NNs to obtain the transfer models between tasks. Second, the obtained NNs transfer knowledge by predicting new promising solutions. Meanwhile, a simple adaptive strategy is developed to find the suitable population size to satisfy various search requirements during the evolution process. Comparison of the experimental results between the proposed NN-based multitask optimization (NNMTO) algorithm and some state-of-the-art multitask algorithms on the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC) 2017 and IEEE CEC2022 benchmarks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the NNMTO. Moreover, NNKT can be seamlessly applied to other EMTO algorithms to further enhance their performances. Finally, the NNMTO is applied to a real-world multitask rover navigation application problem to further demonstrate its applicability.