publications

2026

1. IEEE TEVC

   

   Evolutionary Generative Optimization: Towards Fully Data-Driven Evolutionary Optimization via Generative Learning

   Tao Jiang, Kebin Sun, Zhenyu Liang, and 3 more authors

   IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 2026

   Abs DOI

   Recent advances in data-driven evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have demonstrated the potential of leveraging historical data to improve optimization accuracy and adaptability. Despite these advancements, existing methods remain reliant on handcrafted process-level operators. In contrast, Evolutionary Generative Optimization (EvoGO) is a fully data-driven framework designed from the objective level, enabling autonomous learning of the entire search process. EvoGO streamlines the evolutionary optimization process into three stages: data preparation, model training, and population generation. The data preparation stage constructs a pairwise dataset to enrich training diversity without incurring additional evaluation costs. During model training, a tailored generative model learns to transform inferior solutions into superior ones. In the population generation stage, EvoGO replaces traditional reproduction operators with a scalable and parallelizable generative mechanism. Extensive experiments on numerical benchmarks, classical control problems, and high-dimensional robotic tasks demonstrate that EvoGO consistently converges within merely 10 generations and substantially outperforms a wide spectrum of optimization approaches, including traditional EAs, Bayesian optimization, and reinforcement learning based methods. Code is available at: \urlhttps://github.com/EMI-Group/evogo.

2. IEEE TEVC

   

   Enabling Population-Level Parallelism in Tree-Based Genetic Programming for GPU Acceleration

   Zhihong Wu, Lishuang Wang, Kebin Sun, and 2 more authors

   IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 2026

   Abs DOI

   Tree-based Genetic Programming (TGP) is a widely used evolutionary algorithm for tasks such as symbolic regression, classification, and robotic control. Due to the intensive computational demands of running TGP, GPU acceleration is crucial for achieving scalable performance. However, efficient GPU-based execution of TGP remains challenging, primarily due to three core issues: (1) the structural heterogeneity of program individuals, (2) the complexity of integrating multiple levels of parallelism, and (3) the incompatibility between high-performance CUDA execution and flexible Python-based environments. To address these issues, we propose EvoGP, a high-performance framework tailored for GPU acceleration of TGP via population-level parallel execution. First, EvoGP introduces a tensorized representation that encodes variable-sized trees into fixed-shape, memory-aligned arrays, enabling uniform memory access and parallel computation across diverse individuals. Second, EvoGP adopts an adaptive parallelism strategy that dynamically combines intra- and inter-individual parallelism based on dataset size, ensuring high GPU utilization across a broad spectrum of tasks. Third, EvoGP embeds custom CUDA kernels into the PyTorch runtime, achieving seamless integration with Python-based environments such as Gym, MuJoCo, Brax, and Genesis. Experimental results demonstrate that EvoGP achieves a peak throughput exceeding 10^11 GPops/s. Specifically, this performance represents a speedup of up to 304× over existing GPU-based TGP implementations and 18× over state-of-the-art CPU-based libraries. Furthermore, EvoGP maintains comparable accuracy and exhibits improved scalability across large population sizes. EvoGP is open source and accessible at \urlhttps://github.com/EMI-Group/evogp.

2025

1. IEEE TEVC

   

   Bridging Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization and GPU Acceleration via Tensorization

   Zhenyu Liang, Hao Li, Naiwei Yu, and 2 more authors

   IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 2025

   Abs DOI

   Evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO) has made significant strides over the past two decades. However, as problem scales and complexities increase, traditional EMO algorithms face substantial performance limitations due to insufficient parallelism and scalability. While most work has focused on algorithm design to address these challenges, little attention has been given to hardware acceleration, thereby leaving a clear gap between EMO algorithms and advanced computing devices, such as GPUs. To bridge the gap, we propose to parallelize EMO algorithms on GPUs via the \emphtensorization methodology. By employing tensorization, the data structures and operations of EMO algorithms are transformed into concise tensor representations, which seamlessly enables automatic utilization of GPU computing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying it to three representative EMO algorithms: NSGA-III, MOEA/D, and HypE. To comprehensively assess our methodology, we introduce a multiobjective robot control benchmark using a GPU-accelerated physics engine. Our experiments show that the tensorized EMO algorithms achieve speedups of up to 1113x compared to their CPU-based counterparts, while maintaining solution quality and effectively scaling population sizes to hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, the tensorized EMO algorithms efficiently tackle complex multiobjective robot control tasks, producing high-quality solutions with diverse behaviors. Source codes are available at \urlhttps://github.com/EMI-Group/evomo.

2. IEEE TEVC

   

   MetaDE: Evolving Differential Evolution by Differential Evolution

   Minyang Chen, Chenchen Feng, and Ran Cheng

   IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 2025

   Abs DOI

   As a cornerstone in the Evolutionary Computation (EC) domain, Differential Evolution (DE) is known for its simplicity and effectiveness in handling challenging black-box optimization problems. While the advantages of DE are well-recognized, achieving peak performance heavily depends on its hyperparameters such as the mutation factor, crossover probability, and the selection of specific DE strategies. Traditional approaches to this hyperparameter dilemma have leaned towards parameter tuning or adaptive mechanisms. However, identifying the optimal settings tailored for specific problems remains a persistent challenge. In response, we introduce MetaDE, an approach that evolves DE’s intrinsic hyperparameters and strategies using DE itself at a meta-level. A pivotal aspect of MetaDE is a specialized parameterization technique, which endows it with the capability to dynamically modify DE’s parameters and strategies throughout the evolutionary process. To augment computational efficiency, MetaDE incorporates a design that leverages parallel processing through a GPU-accelerated computing framework. Within such a framework, DE is not just a solver but also an optimizer for its own configurations, thus streamlining the process of hyperparameter optimization and problem-solving into a cohesive and automated workflow. Extensive evaluations on the CEC2022 benchmark suite demonstrate MetaDE’s promising performance. Moreover, when applied to robot control via evolutionary reinforcement learning, MetaDE also demonstrates promising performance. The source code of MetaDE is publicly accessible at: https://github.com/EMI-Group/metade.

2024

1. IEEE TEVC

   

   EvoX: A Distributed GPU-accelerated Framework for Scalable Evolutionary Computation

   Beichen Huang, Ran Cheng, Zhuozhao Li, and 2 more authors

   IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 2024

   Abs DOI

   Inspired by natural evolutionary processes, Evolutionary Computation (EC) has established itself as a cornerstone of Artificial Intelligence. Recently, with the surge in data-intensive applications and large-scale complex systems, the demand for scalable EC solutions has grown significantly. However, most existing EC infrastructures fall short of catering to the heightened demands of large-scale problem solving. While the advent of some pioneering GPU-accelerated EC libraries is a step forward, they also grapple with some limitations, particularly in terms of flexibility and architectural robustness. In response, we introduce EvoX: a computing framework tailored for automated, distributed, and heterogeneous execution of EC algorithms. At the core of EvoX lies a unique programming model to streamline the development of parallelizable EC algorithms, complemented by a computation model specifically optimized for distributed GPU acceleration. Building upon this foundation, we have crafted an extensive library comprising a wide spectrum of 50+ EC algorithms for both single-and multi-objective optimization. Furthermore, the library offers comprehensive support for a diverse set of benchmark problems, ranging from dozens of numerical test functions to hundreds of reinforcement learning tasks. Through extensive experiments across a range of problem scenarios and hardware configurations, EvoX demonstrates robust system and model performances. EvoX is open-source and accessible at: https://github.com/EMI-Group/EvoX.