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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…
Evolution strategy (ES) is one of the promising classes of algorithms for black-box continuous optimization. Despite its broad successes in applications, theoretical analysis on the speed of its convergence is limited on convex quadratic…
The class of algorithms called Hessian Estimation Evolution Strategies (HE-ESs) update the covariance matrix of their sampling distribution by directly estimating the curvature of the objective function. The approach is practically…
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…
The (1+1)-evolution strategy (ES) with success-based step-size adaptation is analyzed on a general convex quadratic function and its monotone transformation, that is, $f(x) = g((x - x^*)^\mathrm{T} H (x - x^*))$, where…
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…
This tutorial introduces the CMA Evolution Strategy (ES), where CMA stands for Covariance Matrix Adaptation. The CMA-ES is a stochastic, or randomized, method for real-parameter (continuous domain) optimization of non-linear, non-convex…
In the context of unconstraint numerical optimization, this paper investigates the global linear convergence of a simple probabilistic derivative-free optimization algorithm (DFO). The algorithm samples a candidate solution from a standard…
The design of binary error-correcting codes is a challenging optimization problem with several applications in telecommunications and storage, which has also been addressed with metaheuristic techniques and evolutionary algorithms. Still,…
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…
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…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
Various variants of the well known Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) have been proposed recently, which improve the empirical performance of the original algorithm by structural modifications. However, in practice it…
The mutation process in evolution strategies has been interlinked with the normal distribution since its inception. Many lines of reasoning have been given for this strong dependency, ranging from maximum entropy arguments to the need for…
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…
This paper addresses the development of a covariance matrix self-adaptation evolution strategy (CMSA-ES) for solving optimization problems with linear constraints. The proposed algorithm is referred to as Linear Constraint CMSA-ES…
Mixed-integer extensions of evolution strategies (ES) that discretize selected coordinates of sampled continuous vectors often impose a lower bound on the standard deviation of integer variables to prevent premature convergence. While these…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are a kind of nature-inspired general-purpose optimization algorithm, and have shown empirically good performance in solving various real-word optimization problems. During the past two decades, promising…
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…
Evolution strategy (ES) has been shown great promise in many challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, rivaling other state-of-the-art deep RL methods. Yet, there are two limitations in the current ES practice that may hinder its…