7.8NEJun 25
Random Walk on Bézier Curves for Global OptimizationJinpeng 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.
4.9CLMay 21, 2025
Enhancing Large Language Models for Detecting Mental Manipulation via Annotation-Free Data Augmentation and Anti-Curriculum DistillationYuansheng Gao, Han Bao, Tong Zhang et al.
Mental manipulation is a subtle yet pervasive form of psychological abuse that poses serious threats to mental health. Nevertheless, detecting mental manipulation remains a largely underexplored research problem. The field faces three major challenges: (i) insufficient and hard-to-obtain training data; (ii) the covert nature of mental manipulation, which hinders detection; and (iii) the lack of real-world datasets. To address these challenges, we propose MentalMAC, a novel framework that enhances large language models' ability to detect elements of mental manipulation in multi-turn dialogue. Our approach consists of three key components: EvoSA, an annotation-free data augmentation method based on evolutionary operations and speech act theory; teacher-model-generated multi-task supervision; and progressive task-level anti-curriculum distillation. We then constructed the ReaMent dataset, comprising 5,000 real-world dialogue samples, utilizing MentalMAC-distilled models to aid in human annotation. Vast experiments show that MentalMAC achieves up to 25.9% improvement in F1mac and 8.1% in accuracy over the best-performing baseline, outperforming commercial LLMs such as GPT-4 and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive to the reader.