Associative Constructive Evolution: Enhancing Metaheuristics through Hebbian-Learned Generative Guidance

TL;DR

This paper introduces Associative Constructive Evolution (ACE), a framework that enhances metaheuristics by learning and guiding search with associative patterns, leading to significant performance improvements.

Contribution

ACE combines Hebbian learning, guided sampling, and symbolic abstraction to improve metaheuristic search efficiency and solution quality.

Findings

ACE-PSO increases success rate by 27.5%.

ACE-EA improves fitness by 10.1%.

ACE discovers 126 interpretable macro-operations.

Abstract

Metaheuristic algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) excel at exploring solution spaces but lack mechanisms to accumulate and reuse procedural knowledge from successful search trajectories. This paper proposes Associative Constructive Evolution (ACE), a framework that enhances metaheuristics through learned generative guidance. ACE introduces a Generative Construction Automaton (GCA) -- a probabilistic model over operation sequences -- coupled with the base metaheuristic in a synergistic loop: the metaheuristic explores and provides trajectory samples, while the GCA consolidates successful patterns and guides future exploration. Three mechanisms realize this cooperation: Hebbian weight consolidation that strengthens associations between co-successful operations, guided sampling that biases search toward learned high-quality regions, and symbolic abstraction that extracts frequent patterns into reusable macro-operations. Experiments integrating ACE with EA and PSO on molecular design and maze navigation demonstrate consistent improvements. ACE-PSO achieves a 27.5% increase in success rate while reducing convergence time by 49.6%. In molecular design, ACE-EA improves fitness by 10.1% with 126 chemically interpretable macro-operations automatically discovered.