Key Principles in Cross-Domain Hyper-Heuristic Performance

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sobotka, Václav, Kletzander, Lucas, Musliu, Nysret, Rudová, Hana
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sobotka, Václav
Kletzander, Lucas
Musliu, Nysret
Rudová, Hana
author_facet Sobotka, Václav
Kletzander, Lucas
Musliu, Nysret
Rudová, Hana
contents Cross-domain selection hyper-heuristics aim to distill decades of research on problem-specific heuristic search algorithms into adaptable general-purpose search strategies. In this respect, existing selection hyper-heuristics primarily focus on an adaptive selection of low-level heuristics (LLHs) from a predefined set. In contrast, we concentrate on the composition of this set and its strategic transformations. We systematically analyze transformations based on three key principles: solution acceptance, LLH repetitions, and perturbation intensity, i.e., the proportion of a solution affected by a perturbative LLH. We demonstrate the raw effects of our transformations on a trivial unbiased random selection mechanism. With an appropriately constructed transformation, this trivial method outperforms all available state-of-the-art hyper-heuristics on three challenging real-world domains and finds 11 new best-known solutions. The same method is competitive with the winner of the CHeSC competition, commonly used as the standard cross-domain benchmark. Moreover, we accompany several recent hyper-heuristics with such strategic transformations. Using this approach, we outperform the current state-of-the-art methods on both the CHeSC benchmark and real-world domains while often simplifying their designs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02782
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Key Principles in Cross-Domain Hyper-Heuristic Performance
Sobotka, Václav
Kletzander, Lucas
Musliu, Nysret
Rudová, Hana
Artificial Intelligence
Cross-domain selection hyper-heuristics aim to distill decades of research on problem-specific heuristic search algorithms into adaptable general-purpose search strategies. In this respect, existing selection hyper-heuristics primarily focus on an adaptive selection of low-level heuristics (LLHs) from a predefined set. In contrast, we concentrate on the composition of this set and its strategic transformations. We systematically analyze transformations based on three key principles: solution acceptance, LLH repetitions, and perturbation intensity, i.e., the proportion of a solution affected by a perturbative LLH. We demonstrate the raw effects of our transformations on a trivial unbiased random selection mechanism. With an appropriately constructed transformation, this trivial method outperforms all available state-of-the-art hyper-heuristics on three challenging real-world domains and finds 11 new best-known solutions. The same method is competitive with the winner of the CHeSC competition, commonly used as the standard cross-domain benchmark. Moreover, we accompany several recent hyper-heuristics with such strategic transformations. Using this approach, we outperform the current state-of-the-art methods on both the CHeSC benchmark and real-world domains while often simplifying their designs.
title Key Principles in Cross-Domain Hyper-Heuristic Performance
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02782