Evolutionary Strategies at Scale lead to Catastrophic Forgetting (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | ES has been shown to improve performance on specific tasks, but it is accompanied by significant forgetting of prior abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Evolutionary Strategies to train gradient-free algorithms to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves performance numbers closer to GRPO for math and reasoning tasks, but forgets prior abilities. |
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