Yinyan Zhang

Yinyan Zhang, Shuai Li

Distributed consensus has been intensively studied in recent years as a means to mitigate state differences among dynamic nodes on a graph. It has been successfully employed in various applications, e.g., formation control of multi-robots, load balancing, clock synchronization. However, almost all existing applications cast an impression of consensus as a simple process to iteratively reach agreement, without any clue on possibility to generate advanced complexity, say shortest path planning, which has been proved to be NP-hard. Counter-intuitively, we show for the first time that the complexity of shortest path planning can emerge from a perturbed version of min-consensus protocol, which as a case study may shed lights to researchers in the field of distributed control to re-think the nature of complexity and the distance between control and intelligence. Besides, we rigorously prove the convergence of graph dynamics and its equivalence to shortest path solutions. An illustrative simulation on a small scale graph is provided to show the convergence of the biased min-consensus dynamics to shortest path solution over the graph. To demonstrate the scalability to large scale problems, a graph with 43826 nodes, which corresponds to a map of a maze in 2D, is considered in the simulation study. Apart from possible applications in robot path planning, the result is further extended to robot complete coverage, showing its potential in real practice such as cleaning robots.

Xinyue Yang, Chen Zheng, Yaoyang Hou et al.

Configuration tuning is critical for database performance. Although recent advancements in database tuning have shown promising results in throughput and latency improvement, challenges remain. First, the vast knob space makes direct optimization unstable and slow to converge. Second, reinforcement learning pipelines often lack effective warm-start guidance and require long offline training. Third, transferability is limited: when hardware or workloads change, existing models typically require substantial retraining to recover performance. To address these limitations, we propose L2T-Tune, a new LLM-guided hybrid database tuning framework that features a three-stage pipeline: Stage one performs a warm start that simultaneously generates uniform samples across the knob space and logs them into a shared pool; Stage two leverages a large language model to mine and prioritize tuning hints from manuals and community documents for rapid convergence. Stage three uses the warm-start sample pool to reduce the dimensionality of knobs and state features, then fine-tunes the configuration with the Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm. We conduct experiments on L2T-Tune and the state-of-the-art models. Compared with the best-performing alternative, our approach improves performance by an average of 37.1% across all workloads, and by up to 73% on TPC-C. Compared with models trained with reinforcement learning, it achieves rapid convergence in the offline tuning stage on a single server. Moreover, during the online tuning stage, it only takes 30 steps to achieve best results.

Yinyan Zhang, Shuai Li, Bin Xu

The beetle antennae search algorithm was recently proposed and investigated for solving global optimization problems. Although the performance of the algorithm and its variants were shown to be better than some existing meta-heuristic algorithms, there is still a lack of convergence analysis. In this paper, we provide theoretical analysis on the convergence of the beetle antennae search algorithm. We test the performance of the BAS algorithm via some representative benchmark functions. Meanwhile, some applications of the BAS algorithm are also presented.

Ameer Tamoor Khan, Shuai Li Senior, Predrag S. Stanimirovic et al.

The paper proposes a novel nature-inspired technique of optimization. It mimics the perching nature of eagles and uses mathematical formulations to introduce a new addition to metaheuristic algorithms. The nature of the proposed algorithm is based on exploration and exploitation. The proposed algorithm is developed into two versions with some modifications. In the first phase, it undergoes a rigorous analysis to find out their performance. In the second phase it is benchmarked using ten functions of two categories; uni-modal functions and multi-modal functions. In the third phase, we conducted a detailed analysis of the algorithm by exploiting its controlling units or variables. In the fourth and last phase, we consider real world optimization problems with constraints. Both versions of the algorithm show an appreciable performance, but analysis puts more weight to the modified version. The competitive analysis shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other tested metaheuristic algorithms. The proposed method has better robustness and computational efficiency.

Yinyan Zhang, Shuai Li, Hongliang Guo

In this paper, we extend a bio-inspired algorithm called the porcellio scaber algorithm (PSA) to solve constrained optimization problems, including a constrained mixed discrete-continuous nonlinear optimization problem. Our extensive experiment results based on benchmark optimization problems show that the PSA has a better performance than many existing methods or algorithms. The results indicate that the PSA is a promising algorithm for constrained optimization.

Yinyan Zhang, Pei Zhang, Shuai Li

Bio-inspired algorithms such as neural network algorithms and genetic algorithms have received a significant amount of attention in both academic and engineering societies. In this paper, based on the observation of two major survival rules of a species of woodlice, i.e., porcellio scaber, we present an algorithm called the porcellio scaber algorithm (PSA) for solving general unconstrained optimization problems, including differentiable and non-differential ones as well as the case with local optima. Numerical results based on benchmark problems are presented to validate the efficacy of PSA.