ME2: A Scalable Modular Meta-heuristic for Multi-modal Multi-dimension Optimization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Map, Explore & Exploit (ME2) is a scalable meta-heuristic for problems in the field of multi-modal, multi-dimension optimization. It has a modular design with three phases, as reflected by its name. Its first phase (Map) generates a set of samples that is mostly uniformly distributed over the search space. The second phase (Explore) explores the neighbourhood of each sample point using an evolutionary strategy, to find a good - not necessarily optimal - set of neighbours. The third phase (Exploit) optimizes the results of the second phase. This final phase applies a simple gradient descent algorithm to find the local optima for each and all of the neighbourhoods, with the objective of finding a/the global optima of the whole space. The performance of ME2 is compared, on a fair basis, with the performance of benchmark optimization algorithms: Genetic Algorithms, Particle Swarm Optimization, Simulated Annealing and Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy. In most test cases it finds the global optima earlier than the other algorithms. It also scales-up, without loss of performance, to higher dimensions. Due to the distributed nature of ME2’s second and third phase, it can be comprehensively parallelized. The search & optimization process during these two phases can be applied to each sample point independently of all the others. A multi-threaded version of ME2 was written and compared to its single-threaded version, resulting in a near-linear speed-up as a function of the number of cores employed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".