From Consistency to Collaborative Discovery: MFEA-CoD for Multitask Novelty Search

Evolutionary multitasking (EMT) has shown strong capability in solving multiple optimization problems simultaneously by exploiting latent inter-task consistency, such as similarities in promising solutions or search directions. However, most existing EMT studies remain focused on objective-driven optimization, where such consistency is mainly used to accelerate convergence toward predefined optima. In this paper, we move EMT from consistency to collaborative discovery and propose a multifactorial evolutionary algorithm with collaborative discovery (MFEA-CoD) for multitask novelty search. Unlike conventional EMT, MFEA-CoD coordinates multiple novelty search tasks to collaboratively discover behaviorally novel solutions rather than merely transferring consistent search information for faster convergence. Specifically, a multitask repulsion operator encourages different tasks to explore distinct regions of the unified search space, thereby reducing redundant behavioral discoveries. Meanwhile, an adaptive inter-task transfer mechanism exploits shared discovery opportunities in overlapping novelty-improving regions by adjusting the transfer probability according to the online contribution of transferred information. Furthermore, MFEA-CoD is extended to multitask novelty-augmented optimization, where behavioral novelty is jointly considered with objective information to alleviate premature convergence caused by deceptive objectives. Experiments on synthetic basin-type problems, deceptive maze navigation problems, MuJoCo policy optimization problems, and generative novelty search problems demonstrate that MFEA-CoD improves the efficiency of discovering diverse novel solutions and shows clear advantages in deceptive objective landscapes.

MToP: A MATLAB Optimization Platform for Evolutionary Multitasking

Evolutionary multitasking (EMT) has been attracting much attention over the past years. It aims to handle multiple optimization tasks simultaneously within limited computing resources assisted by inter-task knowledge transfer techniques. Numerous multitask evolutionary algorithms (MTEAs) for solving multitask optimization (MTO) problems have been proposed in the EMT field, but there lacks a comprehensive software platform to help researchers evaluate MTEA performance on benchmark MTO problems as well as explore real-world applications. To address this issue, we introduce the first open-source optimization platform, named MTO-Platform (MToP), for EMT. It incorporates more than 30 MTEAs, more than 150 MTO problem cases with real-world applications, and more than 10 performance metrics. Moreover, for comparing MTEAs with traditional evolutionary algorithms, we modified more than 30 popular single-task evolutionary algorithms to be able to solve MTO problems in MToP. MToP is a user-friendly tool with a graphical user interface that makes it easy to analyze results, export data, and plot schematics. More importantly, MToP is extensible, allowing users to develop new algorithms and define new problems. The source code of MToP is available at https://github.com/intLyc/MTO-Platform.