Connectionists: new directions in evolution strategy fine-tuning

Risto Miikkulainen risto at cs.utexas.edu
Wed Feb 25 23:37:04 EST 2026


Evolution strategies is an alternative to gradient descent in fine-tuning LLMs. Cognizant AI Lab and collaborators recently completed four new papers on it, evaluating it in several new tasks including math and ARC-AGI, extending it to fine-tuning quantized models, demonstrating how LLMs can be trained to know what they know, and showing why high dimensionality of LLMs is a blessing (not a curse) in fine tuning. For more details, see

Overview blog: https://cgnz.at/6005QZNMb
Papers: https://cgnz.at/6007QZN13 (tasks)
        https://cgnz.at/6003QZNHN (quantized)
        https://cgnz.at/6002QZNGG (metacognition)
        https://cgnz.at/6000QZNyI (blessing)
Animated illustration: https://x.com/RobertoDailey1/status/2026791418380087442

-- Risto

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