Welcome to the Optima Group

We are Learning and Optimization for Machine Intelligence (Optima) research group at the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong. Our major research focus is to combine ideas and techniques from evolutionary computation, traditional mathematical programming and machine learning for designing efficient metaheuristic algorithms for dealing with hard search and optimization problems in fields ranging from engineering design to e-commence and management planning.

The group has an excellent research track record. The multiobjective evolutionary optimization algorithms based on decomposition (MOEA/D) developed by us has become one of the most widely used algorithmic framework in the area of multiobjective evolutionary computation. See Research for more.

We are grateful for the generous support from University Grants Committee (UGC), Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC), National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commission (STIC), Huawei, and CATL.

We are looking for passionate new PhD students, Postdocs, and Master students to join the team (more info) !

       

   

News

8 November 2025

🎉 Our paper “Beyond the Lower Bound: Bridging Regret Minimization and Best Arm Identification in Lexicographic Bandits” has been accepted by AAAI-26!


8 November 2025

🎉 Our paper “CoEvo: Continual Evolution of Symbolic Solutions Using Large Language Models” has been accepted by AAAI-26!


8 November 2025

🎉 Our paper “EoH-S: Evolution of Heuristic Set using LLMs for Automated Heuristic Design” has been accepted by AAAI-26!


8 November 2025

🎉 ‘Our paper “Parametric Pareto Set Learning for Expensive Multi-Objective Optimization” has been accepted by AAAI-26!’


14 February 2025

🎉 Congratulation to Dr. LIU for defending his thesis!


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