2026
Evolution Strategies at Scale: LLM Fine-Tuning Beyond Reinforcement Learning
ICML 2026poster
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is an essential stage of modern AI deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the dominant fine-tuning paradigm, underpinning many state-of-the-art LLMs. In contrast, evolution strategies (ES) has largely been overlooked due t…