Kaichen Ouyang

Yujing Sun, Jie Cai, Xingguo Xu et al.

Dogfight is a tactical behavior of cooperation between fighters. Inspired by this, this paper proposes a novel metaphor-free metaheuristic algorithm called Dogfight Search (DoS). Unlike traditional algorithms, DoS draws algorithmic framework from the inspiration, but its search mechanism is constructed based on the displacement integration equations in kinematics. Through experimental validation on CEC2017 and CEC2022 benchmark test functions, 10 real-world constrained optimization problems and mountainous terrain path planning tasks, DoS significantly outperforms 7 advanced competitors in overall performance and ranks first in the Friedman ranking. Furthermore, this paper compares the performance of DoS with 3 SOTA algorithms on the CEC2017 and CEC2022 benchmark test functions. The results show that DoS continues to maintain its lead, demonstrating strong competitiveness. The source code of DoS is available at https://ww2.mathworks.cn/matlabcentral/fileexchange/183519-dogfight-search.

Junbo Jacob Lian, Feng Xiong, Yujun Sun et al.

Second-order feature statistics are central to texture recognition, yet current methods face a fundamental tension: bilinear pooling and Gram matrices capture global channel correlations but collapse spatial structure, while self-attention models spatial context through weighted aggregation rather than explicit pairwise feature interactions. We introduce TwistNet-2D, a lightweight module that computes \emph{local} pairwise channel products under directional spatial displacement, jointly encoding where features co-occur and how they interact. The core component, Spiral-Twisted Channel Interaction (STCI), shifts one feature map along a prescribed direction before element-wise channel multiplication, thereby capturing the cross-position co-occurrence patterns characteristic of structured and periodic textures. Aggregating four directional heads with learned channel reweighting and injecting the result through a sigmoid-gated residual path, \TwistNet incurs only 3.5% additional parameters and 2% additional FLOPs over ResNet-18, yet consistently surpasses both parameter-matched and substantially larger baselines -- including ConvNeXt, Swin Transformer, and hybrid CNN--Transformer architectures -- across four texture and fine-grained recognition benchmarks.

Jinpeng Wang, Xingguo Xu, Yujing Sun et al.

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in metaheuristic optimization. To address this issue, this paper proposes Bézier Walk Evolution (BWE), a geometry-driven optimization framework that reformulates evolutionary search as adaptive trajectory construction in the decision space. BWE integrates Bézier curve modeling with a distance-aware random walk mechanism to generate topology-guided search trajectories. By adaptively varying the curve order during evolution, the proposed method enables a smooth transition from diversified global exploration to refined local exploitation. Higher-order Bézier curves leverage multiple population-derived control points to enhance search diversity, while lower-order curves generate near-linear trajectories to improve convergence efficiency. This adaptive geometric search mechanism provides an interpretable alternative to conventional nature-inspired designs. Extensive experiments on 41 benchmark functions from the CEC2017 and CEC2022 suites, spanning dimensions from 10 to 100, show that BWE achieves strong overall performance and favorable scalability compared with 7 classical and 6 state-of-the-art optimizers, including L-SHADE and CMA-ES. Additional evaluations on five constrained engineering design problems further demonstrate the practical applicability and robustness of BWE.

Kaichen Ouyang, Zong Ke, Shengwei Fu et al.

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) simulate natural selection but have two main limitations: (1) they rarely update individuals based on global correlations, limiting comprehensive learning; (2) they struggle with balancing exploration and exploitation, where excessive exploitation causes premature convergence, and excessive exploration slows down the search. Moreover, EAs often depend on manual parameter settings, which can disrupt the exploration-exploitation balance. To address these issues, we propose Graph Neural Evolution (GNE), a novel EA framework. GNE represents the population as a graph, where nodes represent individuals, and edges capture their relationships, enabling global information usage. GNE utilizes spectral graph neural networks (GNNs) to decompose evolutionary signals into frequency components, applying a filtering function to fuse these components. High-frequency components capture diverse global information, while low-frequency ones capture more consistent information. This explicit frequency filtering strategy directly controls global-scale features through frequency components, overcoming the limitations of manual parameter settings and making the exploration-exploitation control more interpretable and manageable. Tests on nine benchmark functions (e.g., Sphere, Rastrigin, Rosenbrock) show that GNE outperforms classical (GA, DE, CMA-ES) and advanced algorithms (SDAES, RL-SHADE) under various conditions, including noise-corrupted and optimal solution deviation scenarios. GNE achieves solutions several orders of magnitude better (e.g., 3.07e-20 mean on Sphere vs. 1.51e-07).

K. -C. Ouyang, S. -Y. Zhang, S. -L. Liu et al.

Synthesizing new materials efficiently is highly demanded in various research fields. However, this process is usually slow and expensive, especially for metallic glasses, whose formation strongly depends on the optimal combinations of multiple elements to resist crystallization. This constraint renders only several thousands of candidates explored in the vast material space since 1960. Recently, data-driven approaches armed by advanced machine learning techniques provided alternative routes for intelligent materials design. Due to data scarcity and immature material encoding, the conventional tabular data is usually mined by statistical learning algorithms, giving limited model predictability and generalizability. Here, we propose sophisticated data learning from material network representations. The node elements are encoded from the Wikipedia by a language model. Graph neural networks with versatile architectures are designed to serve as recommendation systems to explore hidden relationships among materials. By employing Wikipedia embeddings from different languages, we assess the capability of natural languages in materials design. Our study proposes a new paradigm to harvesting new amorphous materials and beyond with artificial intelligence.

Junbo Jacob Lian, Mingyang Yu, Kaichen Ouyang et al.

Black-box optimization often relies on evolutionary and swarm algorithms whose performance is highly problem dependent. We view an optimizer as a short program over a small vocabulary of search operators and learn this operator program separately for each problem instance. We instantiate this idea in Operator-Programmed Algorithms (OPAL), a landscape-aware framework for continuous black-box optimization that uses a small design budget with a standard differential evolution baseline to probe the landscape, builds a $k$-nearest neighbor graph over sampled points, and encodes this trajectory with a graph neural network. A meta-learner then maps the resulting representation to a phase-wise schedule of exploration, restart, and local search operators. On the CEC~2017 test suite, a single meta-trained OPAL policy is statistically competitive with state-of-the-art adaptive differential evolution variants and achieves significant improvements over simpler baselines under nonparametric tests. Ablation studies on CEC~2017 justify the choices for the design phase, the trajectory graph, and the operator-program representation, while the meta-components add only modest wall-clock overhead. Overall, the results indicate that operator-programmed, landscape-aware per-instance design is a practical way forward beyond ad hoc metaphor-based algorithms in black-box optimization.

Kaichen Ouyang

This paper develops a neural jamming phase diagram that interprets the emergence of consciousness in large language models as a critical phenomenon in high-dimensional disordered systems.By establishing analogies with jamming transitions in granular matter and other complex systems, we identify three fundamental control parameters governing the phase behavior of neural networks: temperature, volume fraction, and stress.The theory provides a unified physical explanation for empirical scaling laws in artificial intelligence, demonstrating how computational cooling, density optimization, and noise reduction collectively drive systems toward a critical jamming surface where generalized intelligence emerges. Remarkably, the same thermodynamic principles that describe conventional jamming transitions appear to underlie the emergence of consciousness in neural networks, evidenced by shared critical signatures including divergent correlation lengths and scaling exponents.Our work explains neural language models' critical scaling through jamming physics, suggesting consciousness is a jamming phase that intrinsically connects knowledge components via long-range correlations.

Kaichen Ouyang

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great potential in graph data analysis due to their powerful representation capabilities. However, as the network depth increases, the issue of over-smoothing becomes more severe, causing node representations to lose their distinctiveness. This paper analyzes the mechanism of over-smoothing through the analogy to Anderson localization and introduces participation degree as a metric to quantify this phenomenon. Specifically, as the depth of the GNN increases, node features homogenize after multiple layers of message passing, leading to a loss of distinctiveness, similar to the behavior of vibration modes in disordered systems. In this context, over-smoothing in GNNs can be understood as the expansion of low-frequency modes (increased participation degree) and the localization of high-frequency modes (decreased participation degree). Based on this, we systematically reviewed the potential connection between the Anderson localization behavior in disordered systems and the over-smoothing behavior in Graph Neural Networks. A theoretical analysis was conducted, and we proposed the potential of alleviating over-smoothing by reducing the disorder in information propagation.

Juntao Yu, Jiaquan Yu, Dedai Wei et al.

In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-objective optimization algorithm, the Multi-Objective Mobile Damped Wave Algorithm (MOMDWA), specifically designed to address complex quantum control problems. Our approach extends the capabilities of the original Mobile Damped Wave Algorithm (MDWA) by incorporating multiple objectives, enabling a more comprehensive optimization process. We applied MOMDWA to three quantum control scenarios, focusing on optimizing the balance between control fidelity, energy consumption, and control smoothness. The results demonstrate that MOMDWA significantly enhances quantum control efficiency and robustness, achieving high fidelity while minimizing energy use and ensuring smooth control pulses. This advancement offers a valuable tool for quantum computing and other domains requiring precise, multi-objective control.