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Evolution strategies (ES), as a family of black-box optimization algorithms, recently emerge as a scalable alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) approaches such as Q-learning or policy gradient, and are much faster when many central…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Zhi Wang , Chunlin Chen , Daoyi Dong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…

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

Evolution Strategies (ES) are stochastic derivative-free optimization algorithms whose most prominent representative, the CMA-ES algorithm, is widely used to solve difficult numerical optimization problems. We provide the first rigorous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-25 Cheikh Touré , Anne Auger , Nikolaus Hansen

Data selection is designed to accelerate learning with preserved performance. To achieve this, a fundamental thought is to identify informative data samples with significant contributions to the training. In this work, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Ziheng Cheng , Zhong Li , Jiang Bian

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms and evolution strategies (ES) have been applied to various tasks, showing excellent performances. These have the opposite properties, with DRL having good sample efficiency and poor stability,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Kyunghyun Lee , Byeong-Uk Lee , Ukcheol Shin , In So Kweon

We consider the transfer of experience samples (i.e., tuples < s, a, s', r >) in reinforcement learning (RL), collected from a set of source tasks to improve the learning process in a given target task. Most of the related approaches focus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-29 Andrea Tirinzoni , Andrea Sessa , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

Deep neuroevolution, that is evolutionary policy search methods based on deep neural networks, have recently emerged as a competitor to deep reinforcement learning algorithms due to their better parallelization capabilities. However, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-20 Aloïs Pourchot , Nicolas Perrin , Olivier Sigaud

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

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

We present a subset selection algorithm designed to work with arbitrary model families in a practical batch setting. In such a setting, an algorithm can sample examples one at a time but, in order to limit overhead costs, is only able to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Gui Citovsky , Giulia DeSalvo , Sanjiv Kumar , Srikumar Ramalingam , Afshin Rostamizadeh , Yunjuan Wang

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

In this work we show that Evolution Strategies (ES) are a viable method for learning non-differentiable parameters of large supervised models. ES are black-box optimization algorithms that estimate distributions of model parameters; however…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Karel Lenc , Erich Elsen , Tom Schaul , Karen Simonyan

Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a scalable gradient-free alternative to reinforcement learning based LLM fine-tuning, but it remains unclear whether comparable task performance implies comparable solutions in parameter space. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 William Hoy , Binxu Wang , Xu Pan
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