Machine learning-enabled globally guaranteed evolutionary computation

Evolutionary computation, for example, particle swarm optimization, has impressive achievements in solving complex problems in science and industry; however, an important open problem in evolutionary computation is that there is no theoretical guarantee of reaching the global optimum and general reliability; this is due to the lack of a unified representation of diverse problem structures and a generic mechanism by which to avoid local optima. This unresolved challenge impairs trust in the applicability of evolutionary computation to a variety of problems. Here we report an evolutionary computation framework aided by machine learning, named EVOLER, which enables the theoretically guaranteed global optimization of a range of complex non-convex problems. This is achieved by: (1) learning a low-rank representation of a problem with limited samples, which helps to identify an attention subspace; and (2) exploring this small attention subspace via the evolutionary computation method, which helps to reliably avoid local optima. As validated on 20 challenging benchmarks, this method finds the global optimum with a probability approaching 1. We use EVOLER to tackle two important problems: power grid dispatch and the inverse design of nanophotonics devices. The method consistently reached optimal results that were challenging to achieve with previous state-of-the-art methods. EVOLER takes a leap forwards in globally guaranteed evolutionary computation, overcoming the uncertainty of data-driven black-box methods, and offering broad prospects for tackling complex real-world problems. Evolutionary computation methods can find useful solutions for many complex real-world science and engineering problems, but in general there is no guarantee for finding the best solution. This challenge can be tackled with a new framework incorporating machine learning that helps evolutionary methods to avoid local optima.