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We explore the use of Evolution Strategies (ES), a class of black box optimization algorithms, as an alternative to popular MDP-based RL techniques such as Q-learning and Policy Gradients. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari show that ES is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-11 Tim Salimans , Jonathan Ho , Xi Chen , Szymon Sidor , Ilya Sutskever

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is an essential stage of modern AI deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the dominant fine-tuning paradigm, underpinning many state-of-the-art LLMs. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xin Qiu , Yulu Gan , Conor F. Hayes , Qiyao Liang , Yinggan Xu , Roberto Dailey , Elliot Meyerson , Babak Hodjat , Risto Miikkulainen

Evolution Strategy (ES) is a powerful black-box optimization technique based on the idea of natural evolution. In each of its iterations, a key step entails ranking candidate solutions based on some fitness score. For an ES method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Eshwar S R , Shishir Kolathaya , Gugan Thoppe

Although deep reinforcement learning methods can learn effective policies for challenging problems such as Atari games and robotics tasks, algorithms are complex, and training times are often long. This study investigates how Evolution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Annie Wong , Jacob de Nobel , Thomas Bäck , Aske Plaat , Anna V. Kononova

Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of black-box optimization algorithms able to train deep neural networks roughly as well as Q-learning and policy gradient methods on challenging deep reinforcement learning (RL) problems, but are much…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Edoardo Conti , Vashisht Madhavan , Felipe Petroski Such , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

An evolution strategy (ES) variant based on a simplification of a natural evolution strategy recently attracted attention because it performs surprisingly well in challenging deep reinforcement learning domains. It searches for neural…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-05-03 Joel Lehman , Jay Chen , Jeff Clune , Kenneth O. Stanley

Evolution Strategies (ES) is a class of powerful black-box optimisation methods that are highly parallelisable and can handle non-differentiable and noisy objectives. However, na\"ive ES becomes prohibitively expensive at scale on GPUs due…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for addressing complex control problems, particularly those involving underactuated robotic systems. However, in some cases, policies may require refinement to achieve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Marco Calì , Alberto Sinigaglia , Niccolò Turcato , Ruggero Carli , Gian Antonio Susto

Evolution Strategies (ESs) have recently become popular for training deep neural networks, in particular on reinforcement learning tasks, a special form of controller design. Compared to classic problems in continuous direct search, deep…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-07-03 Nils Müller , Tobias Glasmachers

Evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is an important solution concept in game theory which has been applied frequently to biological models. Informally an ESS is a strategy that if followed by the population cannot be taken over by a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-01-18 Sam Ganzfried

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning has proven highly effective for complex decision-making problems, it demands significant computational resources and careful parameter adjustment in order to develop successful strategies. Evolution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Adrian Martínez , Ananya Gupta , Hanka Goralija , Mario Rico , Saúl Fenollosa , Tamar Alphaidze

Evolution Strategies (ES) are a powerful class of blackbox optimization techniques that recently became a competitive alternative to state-of-the-art policy gradient (PG) algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL). We propose a new method…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-03-16 Yunhao Tang , Krzysztof Choromanski , Alp Kucukelbir

We explore the capability of evolution strategies to train an agent with a policy based on a transformer architecture in a reinforcement learning setting. We performed experiments using OpenAI's highly parallelizable evolution strategy to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Matyáš Lorenc , Roman Neruda

One of the biggest missing capabilities in current AI systems is the ability to learn continuously after deployment. Implementing such continually learning systems have several challenges, one of which is the large memory requirement of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Immanuel Abdi , Akshat Gupta , Micah Mok , Alexander Lu , Nicholas Lee , Gopala Anumanchipalli

Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a competitive alternative for model-free reinforcement learning, showcasing exemplary performance in tasks like Mujoco and Atari. Notably, they shine in scenarios with imperfect reward functions,…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Chengqian Gao , William de Vazelhes , Hualin Zhang , Bin Gu , Zhiqiang Xu

In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning method in a reinforcement learning setting, based on evolution strategies (ES), exploration in parameter space and deterministic policy gradients. ES methods are easy to parallelize, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-09 Yiming Shen , Kehan Yang , Yufeng Yuan , Simon Cheng Liu

Evolutionary Strategies (ES) are a popular family of black-box zeroth-order optimization algorithms which rely on search distributions to efficiently optimize a large variety of objective functions. This paper investigates the potential…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-02-01 Louis Faury , Clement Calauzenes , Olivier Fercoq , Syrine Krichen

Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (ERL) that applying Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) to optimize the weight parameters of Deep Neural Network (DNN) based policies has been widely regarded as an alternative to traditional reinforcement…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Lan Tang , Xiaxi Li , Jinyuan Zhang , Guiying Li , Peng Yang , Ke Tang

Evolution Strategies (ES) has recently emerged as a competitive alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, offering advantages through simplicity, scalability, and inference-only training.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Kajetan Schweighofer , Conor F. Hayes , Roberto Dailey , Risto Miikkulainen , Xin Qiu

In this paper, we try to improve exploration in Blackbox methods, particularly Evolution strategies (ES), when applied to Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems where intermediate waypoints/subgoals are available. Since Evolutionary…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Kiran Lekkala , Laurent Itti
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