ME2: A Scalable Modular Meta-heuristic for Multi-modal Multi-dimension Optimization
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 it