Adaptive Reinforced Gray Langur Optimization for Feature Selection and SVR Modeling of Polysaccharides in Dendrobium huoshanense via NIR Spectroscopy

Abstract

Adaptive Reinforced Gray Langur Optimization (ARGLO), an enhanced variant of the Gray Langurs Optimizer, is developed for high-dimensional, multimodal, and nonlinear search landscapes susceptible to local trapping. Although the original GLO performs multi-population cooperative search by simulating the social structures of gray langurs, it still suffers from uneven random initialization, insufficient adaptive population partitioning, weak local perturbation, and premature convergence. ARGLO incorporates three strategies: good point set-based oppositional and quasi-oppositional learning initialization, hierarchical equilibrium adaptive population partitioning, and elite-guided hybrid mutation. Collectively, these mechanisms generate a higher-quality starting population, coordinate global search with local refinement, and reduce the risk of entrapment in suboptimal regions. Evidence from component-wise experiments together with the CEC test suite indicates that ARGLO delivers higher solution precision, steadier convergence, as well as more consistent performance, especially as dimensionality increases. Moreover, ARGLO is applied to near-infrared spectral feature selection and SVR parameter optimization for polysaccharide content prediction in Dendrobium huoshanense. Compared with unoptimized SVR, ARGLO-SVR reduces RMSE by 35.35% and improves R2 by 21.92%; compared with GLO-SVR, it reduces RMSE by 6.05% and improves R2 by 2.30%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and application potential of ARGLO in complex optimization and rapid nondestructive quality detection of traditional Chinese medicinal materials.