Introducing EvoGrad: A Lightweight Library for Gradient-Based Evolution

Tools that enable fast and flexible experimentation democratize and accelerate machine learning research. Take for example the development of libraries for automatic differentiation, such as Theano, Caffe, TensorFlow, and PyTorch: these libraries have been instrumental in catalyzing machine learning research, enabling gradient descent training without the tedious work of hand-computing derivatives. In these frameworks, it’s simple to experiment by adjusting the size and depth of a neural network, by changing the error function that is to be optimized, and even by inventing new architectural elements, like layers and activation functions–all without having to worry about how to derive the resulting gradient of improvement.

One field that so far has not been greatly impacted by automatic differentiation tools is evolutionary computation. The reason is that most evolutionary algorithms are gradient-free: they do not follow any explicit mathematical gradient (i.e., the mathematically optimal local direction of improvement), and instead proceed through a generate-and-test heuristic. In other words, they create new variants, test them out, and keep the best.

Source: uber.com