Evolution Strategies at the Hyperscale

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16652v1
• Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2025 18:56:05 GMT
• Title: Evolution Strategies at the Hyperscale
• Authors: Bidipta Sarkar, Mattie Fellows, Juan Agustin Duque, Alistair Letcher, Antonio León Villares, Anya Sims, Dylan Cope, Jarek Liesen, Lukas Seier, Theo Wolf, Uljad Berdica, Alexander David Goldie, Aaron Courville, Karin Sevegnani, Shimon Whiteson, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster,
• Abstract summary: We introduce EGGROLL, an evolution strategies (ES) algorithm designed to scale backprop-free optimization to large population sizes.<n>ES is a set of powerful blackbox optimisation methods that can handle non-differentiable or noisy objectives.<n>EGGROLL overcomes these bottlenecks by generating random matrices $Ain mathbbRmtimes r, Bin mathbbRntimes r$ with $rll min(m,n)$ to form a low-rank matrix perturbation $A Btop$
• Score: 57.75314521465674
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We introduce Evolution Guided General Optimization via Low-rank Learning (EGGROLL), an evolution strategies (ES) algorithm designed to scale backprop-free optimization to large population sizes for modern large neural network architectures with billions of parameters. ES is a set of powerful blackbox optimisation methods that can handle non-differentiable or noisy objectives with excellent scaling potential through parallelisation. Na{ï}ve ES becomes prohibitively expensive at scale due to the computational and memory costs associated with generating matrix perturbations $E\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ and the batched matrix multiplications needed to compute per-member forward passes. EGGROLL overcomes these bottlenecks by generating random matrices $A\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times r},\ B\in \mathbb{R}^{n\times r}$ with $r\ll \min(m,n)$ to form a low-rank matrix perturbation $A B^\top$ that are used in place of the full-rank perturbation $E$. As the overall update is an average across a population of $N$ workers, this still results in a high-rank update but with significant memory and computation savings, reducing the auxiliary storage from $mn$ to $r(m+n)$ per layer and the cost of a forward pass from $\mathcal{O}(mn)$ to $\mathcal{O}(r(m+n))$ when compared to full-rank ES. A theoretical analysis reveals our low-rank update converges to the full-rank update at a fast $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{r}\right)$ rate. Our experiments show that (1) EGGROLL does not compromise the performance of ES in tabula-rasa RL settings, despite being faster, (2) it is competitive with GRPO as a technique for improving LLM reasoning, and (3) EGGROLL enables stable pre-training of nonlinear recurrent language models that operate purely in integer datatypes.

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