Bandit Recombination: The Preliminary Study of a Novel Genetic Algorithm Operator

This paper introduces Bandit Recombination (BR), a novel genetic algorithm (GA) operator that leverages the multi-armed bandit (MAB) paradigm to enhance the exploitation of high-performance solutions in combinatorial optimization. BR dynamically balances exploration and exploitation via the ϵ-greedy strategy, using reward and pull matrices to guide recombination from an elite subpopulation. In a preliminary study on the NP-hard generalized assignment problem (GAP), BR-augmented GA achieves mean fitness improvements over baseline GA across diverse datasets.