A Survey on Learnable Evolutionary Algorithms for Scalable Multiobjective Optimization

Recent decades have witnessed remarkable advancements in multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) that have been adopted to solve various multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs). However, these progressively improved MOEAs have not necessarily been equipped with sophisticatedly scalable and learnable problem-solving strategies that are able to cope with new and grand challenges brought by the scaling-up MOPs with continuously increasing complexity or scale from diverse aspects, mainly including expensive function evaluations, many objectives, large-scale search space, time-varying environments, and multitask. Under different scenarios, it requires divergent thinking to design new powerful MOEAs for solving them effectively. In this context, research into learnable MOEAs that arm themselves with machine learning techniques for scaling-up MOPs has received extensive attention in the field of evolutionary computation. In this paper, we begin with a taxonomy of scalable MOPs and learnable MOEAs, followed by an analysis of the challenges that scaling up MOPs pose to traditional MOEAs. Then, we synthetically overview recent advances of learnable MOEAs in solving various scaling up MOPs, focusing primarily on three attractive and promising directions (i.e., learnable evolutionary discriminators for environmental selection, learnable evolutionary generators for reproduction, and learnable evolutionary transfer for sharing or reusing optimization experience between different problem domains). The insight into learnable MOEAs held throughout this paper is offered to the readers as a reference to the general track of the efforts in this field.