Qinbin He

Yifu Zhao, Xiaofan Zou, Junhao Wei et al.

Learning-assisted algorithm design often has to make reliable search decisions under small evaluation budgets, where committing to a single metaheuristic can be unreliable. We propose WASHH, a Whale-guided Adaptive Selection Hyper-Heuristic for continuous black-box optimization. WASHH uses WOA as the main exploitation backbone, but treats PSO-style memory, GWO-style leader averaging, DE-style variation, local coordinate search, and anchor-guided refinement as selectable search behaviors. An online reward controller allocates evaluations according to observed improvements, while anchor refinement exploits inexpensive reference configurations such as box centers or default model settings without bypassing black-box evaluation. On ten 30-dimensional benchmark functions with 10 independent runs and 12,000 evaluations, WASHH achieves the best average rank, 1.10, and is best or tied best on all ten functions. It strictly improves over WOA on eight functions and ties WOA at the numerical optimum on Rastrigin and Griewank. We further study SVC hyperparameter configuration for breast cancer diagnosis under a 300-evaluation budget. WASHH obtains the lowest mean validation log loss among the compared optimizers, suggesting that anchor-aware selection hyper-heuristics are a practical lightweight direction for LEAD systems.

Junhao Wei, Yanxiao Li, Yifu Zhao et al.

Learning-assisted hyper-heuristics can select among dispatching rules while preserving the feasibility and interpretability of constructive Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) heuristics. Their main computational cost lies in label generation rather than model fitting, since each supervised label usually requires rolling out candidate rules from a partial schedule. We study this label-cost problem together with a reliability problem: a learned selector should not switch away from a strong default rule unless the predicted gain is credible. The proposed selector uses regret-normalized rollout labels, a contextual KNN uncertainty estimate, and a gate that acts only when the predicted improvement exceeds an uncertainty-adjusted margin. We also vary rollout depth and breadth to measure the cost-quality trade-off. On synthetic JSSP instances, the gated selector achieves the lowest mean RPD among learned selectors, remains close to the best fixed dispatching rule, and reduces Random-HH mean RPD by more than an order of magnitude.