Ideological Sublations: Resolution of Dialectic in Population-based Optimization
This work addresses optimization challenges in fields like signal processing and engineering, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing evolutionary algorithms with a novel philosophical twist.
The authors tackled the problem of balancing exploration and exploitation in population-based optimization by designing an algorithm inspired by philosophical dialectics, which achieved fast and efficient performance on benchmark functions and specific applications like compressed sensing and massive MIMO.
A population-based optimization algorithm was designed, inspired by two main thinking modes in philosophy, both based on dialectic concept and thesis-antithesis paradigm. They impose two different kinds of dialectics. Idealistic and materialistic antitheses are formulated as optimization models. Based on the models, the population is coordinated for dialectical interactions. At the population-based context, the formulated optimization models are reduced to a simple detection problem for each thinker (particle). According to the assigned thinking mode to each thinker and her/his measurements of corresponding dialectic with other candidate particles, they deterministically decide to interact with a thinker in maximum dialectic with their theses. The position of a thinker at maximum dialectic is known as an available antithesis among the existing solutions. The dialectical interactions at each ideological community are distinguished by meaningful distributions of step-sizes for each thinking mode. In fact, the thinking modes are regarded as exploration and exploitation elements of the proposed algorithm. The result is a delicate balance without any requirement for adjustment of step-size coefficients. Main parameter of the proposed algorithm is the number of particles appointed to each thinking modes, or equivalently for each kind of motions. An additional integer parameter is defined to boost the stability of the final algorithm in some particular problems. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by a testbed of 12 single-objective continuous benchmark functions. Moreover, its performance and speed were highlighted in sparse reconstruction and antenna selection problems, at the context of compressed sensing and massive MIMO, respectively. The results indicate fast and efficient performance in comparison with well-known evolutionary algorithms and dedicated state-of-the-art algorithms.