Elitism, which constructs the new population by preserving best solutions out of the old population and newly-generated solutions, has been a default way for population update since its introduction into multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) in the late 1990s. In this paper, we take an opposite perspective to conduct the population update in MOEAs by simply discarding elitism. That is, we treat the newly-generated solutions as the new population directly (so that all selection pressure comes from mating selection). We propose a simple non-elitist MOEA (called NE-MOEA) that only uses Pareto dominance sorting to compare solutions, without involving any diversity-related selection criterion. Preliminary experimental results show that NE-MOEA can compete with well-known elitist MOEAs (NSGA-II, SMS-EMOA and NSGA-III) on several combinatorial problems. Lastly, we discuss limitations of the proposed non-elitist algorithm and suggest possible future research directions.

翻译：精英主义，即通过保留旧种群与新生解中的最优解来构建新种群，自20世纪90年代末引入多目标进化算法（MOEAs）以来，已成为种群更新的默认方式。本文采用相反视角，通过简单摒弃精英主义来执行MOEA中的种群更新，即直接将新生解作为新种群（从而使所有选择压力来自交配选择）。我们提出一种简单的非精英主义MOEA（简称NE-MOEA），该方法仅使用帕累托支配排序比较解，不涉及任何与多样性相关的选择准则。初步实验结果表明，NE-MOEA能在多个组合优化问题上与知名精英主义MOEAs（NSGA-II、SMS-EMOA和NSGA-III）相竞争。最后，我们讨论了所提非精英主义算法的局限性，并提出了可能的未来研究方向。