用合成目标引导搜索策略,提升黑箱组合优化效率
SCOPE: Synthetic Conditional Objectives for Policy Evolution in Black-Box Combinatorial Optimization

- 通过历史搜索数据生成多样合成目标,指导策略进化
- 在有限评估预算下,显著提升多类组合优化问题的求解性能
- 适合资源受限场景下的自动优化算法设计
黑箱组合优化需在有限评估预算下系统发现高质量解,但未知目标函数难以指导搜索方向。本文提出SCOPE框架,不直接优化不可访问的目标,而是基于累积搜索历史学习一组条件合成目标,每个目标旨在揭示候选解间的独特偏好。这些目标用于演化生成多样化解的搜索策略,其真实质量通过黑箱评估验证。外层循环根据策略发现潜力区域的效果,自适应更新和选择合成目标;内层循环返回一组表现最优策略,降低单一代理偏好风险。该框架将目标设计转化为引导策略探索的机制,在利用观测证据的同时保持离散解空间的结构化多样性。跨多个基准问题的实验表明,SCOPE在有限评估预算下持续提升黑箱搜索性能,并对不同组合结构具有良好泛化能力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Black-box combinatorial optimization requires systematically identifying high-quality solutions under a limited evaluation budget, yet the unknown objective function provides little guidance for deciding where the search should explore next. We introduce SCOPE, a general framework for Synthetic Conditional Objectives for Policy Evolution in Black-Box Combinatorial Optimization. Rather than directly optimizing the inaccessible objective, SCOPE learns a set of synthetic objectives conditioned on the accumulated search history, where each objective is designed to expose a distinct and potentially useful preference over candidate solutions. These objectives are then used to evolve search policies that generate diverse candidates, whose true quality is subsequently assessed through black-box evaluations. The outer loop adaptively updates and selects synthetic objectives according to how effectively their induced policies discover promising regions. In contrast, the inner loop returns a portfolio of top-performing policies to reduce the risk of relying on a single surrogate preference. This formulation reframes objective design as a mechanism for guiding policy exploration, enabling the search process to exploit observed evidence while maintaining structured diversity across discrete solution spaces. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark problems demonstrate that SCOPE consistently improves black-box search performance under limited evaluation budgets and generalizes well across diverse combinatorial structures.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。