Speeding Up Hyper-Heuristics With Markov-Chain Operator Selection and the Only-Worsening Acceptance OperatorAbderrahim Bendahi, Benjamin Doerr, Adrien Fradin, Johannes F. Lutzeyerhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01107
Speeding Up Hyper-Heuristics With Markov-Chain Operator Selection and the Only-Worsening Acceptance OperatorThe move-acceptance hyper-heuristic was recently shown to be able to leave local optima with astonishing efficiency (Lissovoi et al., Artificial Intelligence (2023)). In this work, we propose two modifications to this algorithm that demonstrate impressive performances on a large class of benchmarks including the classic Cliff$_d$ and Jump$_m$ function classes. (i) Instead of randomly choosing between the only-improving and any-move acceptance operator, we take this choice via a simple two-state…