Knowledge Transfer Based on Particle Filters for Multi-Objective Optimization

Particle filters, also known as sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, constitute a class of importance sampling and resampling techniques designed to use simulations to perform on-line filtering. Recently, particle filters have been extended for optimization by utilizing the ability to track a sequence of distributions. In this work, we incorporate transfer learning capabilities into the optimizer by using particle filters. To achieve this, we propose a novel particle-filter-based multi-objective optimization algorithm (PF-MOA) by transferring knowledge acquired from the search experience. The key insight adopted here is that, if we can construct a sequence of target distributions that can balance the multiple objectives and make the degree of the balance controllable, we can approximate the Pareto optimal solutions by simulating each target distribution via particle filters. As the importance weight updating step takes the previous target distribution as the proposal distribution and takes the current target distribution as the target distribution, the knowledge acquired from the previous run can be utilized in the current run by carefully designing the set of target distributions. The experimental results on the DTLZ and WFG test suites show that the proposed PF-MOA achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art multi-objective evolutionary algorithms on most test instances.