CVFeb 6
TwistNet-2D: Learning Second-Order Channel Interactions via Spiral Twisting for Texture RecognitionJunbo 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.
NEDec 23, 2024
Learn from Global Correlations: Enhancing Evolutionary Algorithm via Spectral GNNKaichen 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).
NEDec 14, 2025
OPAL: Operator-Programmed Algorithms for Landscape-Aware Black-Box OptimizationJunbo 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.
QUANT-PHFeb 6, 2025
Multi-Objective Mobile Damped Wave Algorithm (MOMDWA): A Novel Approach For Quantum System ControlJuntao 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.