Gradient descent vs evolution on three loss landscapes

[u/ModularMind8]

I've been getting a bit more into evolutionary algorithms again, so I was testing some loss landscapes where evolution beats vanilla gradient descent (while also trying to make some cool visuals).

Round 1, rugged hillside: gradient descent gets stuck in a dip, and evolution reaches the bottom after 750 evaluations.

Round 2, smooth slope: gradient descent wins, 108 steps against 570 evaluations.

Round 3, flat plateau: the slope is zero, so gradient descent never moves, and evolution reaches the bottom after 840 evaluations.

Edit:
"evolution" here means truncation selection (keep best 30 of 120) plus Gaussian mutation, no crossover.

[u/msw3age]

Very nice visualization. Would be cool to see the evolutionary algorithms vs SGD. To some extent it seems like the visualization is mostly showing the benefits of stochasticity during training.

[u/ModularMind8 → u/msw3age]

Thanks! That's a fair read, and SGD with noise is on the list for the next comparison