Diversity-Based Fitness Regularization in Genetic Algorithms: A Methodological Audit Across Population Sizes
This paper audits a diversity-based fitness regularization method in genetic algorithms against a magnitude-matched noise control protocol, finding that its purported benefits are largely indistinguishable from unstructured noise and driven by outliers, thereby supporting the method only in a narrow regime while establishing a rigorous framework for future evaluations of inertia mechanisms.