Advancing Automated Knowledge Transfer in Evolutionary Multitasking via Large Language Models

Abstract: Evolutionary Multi-task Optimization (EMTO) is a paradigm that leverages knowledge transfer across simultaneously optimized tasks for enhanced search performance. To facilitate EMTO's performance, various knowledge transfer models have been developed for specific optimization tasks. However, designing these models often requires substantial expert knowledge. Recently, LLMs have achieved remarkable success in autonomous programming, aiming to produce effective solvers for specific problems. In this work, a LLM-based optimization paradigm is introduced to establish an autonomous model factory for generating knowledge transfer models, ensuring effective and efficient knowledge transfer across various optimization tasks. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we conducted comprehensive empirical studies comparing the knowledge transfer model generated by the LLM with existing state-of-the-art knowledge transfer methods. The results demonstrate that the generated model is able to achieve superior or competitive performance against hand-crafted knowledge transfer models in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.