MMAO-Cls: Metabolic Multi-Agent Optimization for Joint Feature Selection and Classifier Tuning

arXiv:2607.01539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies whether the Metabolic Multi-Agent Optimizer (MMAO) can act as a credible outer-loop optimizer for classification model selection. We propose MMAO-Cls, a mixed-space realization in which each agent jointly encodes a binary feature mask and classifier hyperparameters, while private energy, communal budget, role drift, and lifecycle turnover are mapped to the accuracy-complexity tradeoff of wrapper learning. The implementation is strengthened by deriving feature-budget adaptation from feature-information priors and by regularizing validation reward with both subset compactness and train-validation overfitting gap. We evaluate MMAO-Cls on seven standard tabular benchmarks with three seeds each and compare it against RandomSearch, GA-lite, PSO-lite, and an endogenous no-sharing ablation. On the aggregate validation objective, MMAO-Cls ranks second (0.9433) behind GA-lite (0.9446). On held-out test performance, it reaches mean score 0.8882, improving over RandomSearch (0.8808) and GA-lite (0.8857), remaining close to PSO-lite (0.8874) and the no-sharing ablation (0.8900), while using the most compact mean held-out feature subset among all compared methods (feature ratio 0.4881). Pairwise tests show that these margins are not yet statistically significant. The resulting claim is therefore conservative: MMAO-Cls supports classification applicability and compact mixed-space search more clearly than it isolates communal sharing as a decisive standalone advantage.

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-07-03