We’ve discovered that evolution strategies (ES), an optimization technique that’s been known for decades, rivals the performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) techniques on modern RL benchmarks (e. g.
We’re releasing an experimental metalearning approach called Evolved Policy Gradients, a method that evolves the loss function of learning agents, which can enable fast training on novel tasks. Agents trained with EPG can succeed at basic tasks at test time that were outside their training regime, like learning to navigate to an object on a different side of the room from where it was placed during training.
The paper investigates continual reinforcement learning using neuroevolution, comparing evolution strategies (ES) and genetic algorithms (GAs) across diverse environments and network sizes. ES consistently achieves a better balance between stability and plasticity, while GAs are more plastic but forget more. The authors attribute this to ES finding wider neighborhoods in weight space, with overlap between consecutive tasks correlating with the stability-plasticity trade‑off, and note that common RL plasticity issues do not transfer to neuroevolution.
arXiv:2509. 24372v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is an essential stage of modern AI deployment.
arXiv:2606. 10129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While deep Reinforcement Learning (deep-RL) has been increasingly applied to parameter control in evolutionary algorithms, rigorous theoretical analysis of parameter control remains largely restricted to single-parameter settings, owing to the difficulty of deriving effective, interpretable multi-parameter policies amenable to formal study.
arXiv:2604. 01499v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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.
arXiv:2608. 12679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in discovery domains such as math and science.
arXiv:2608. 13600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study Evolution Strategies (ES) for continual control, where agents must adapt to changing tasks without forgetting previous ones.
Agentic ESOpt proposes using evolution strategies (ES) instead of reinforcement learning to fine‑tune large language‑model agents for long‑horizon tasks. ES offers model scalability, flexibility, and better long‑horizon credit assignment, enabling full‑parameter optimization with minimal GPU memory. The framework samples parameter perturbations, evaluates agents with rewards, and updates online, achieving notable performance gains on WebArena‑Lite and in test‑time prompt‑parameter co‑evolution.
arXiv:2601. 04365v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In evolutionary reinforcement learning tasks (ERL), agent policies are often encoded as small artificial neural networks (NERL).
We’re releasing a new class of reinforcement learning algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which perform comparably or better than state-of-the-art approaches while being much simpler to implement and tune. PPO has become the default reinforcement learning algorithm at OpenAI because of its ease of use and good performance.
arXiv:2607. 21971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling through iterative self-evolution with environment feedback, as demonstrated by AlphaEvolve, shows remarkable performance gains.
arXiv:2609.00129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The performance of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models degrades when the problem they were trained on drifts. This is a nea...