Efficacy of Modern Neuro-Evolutionary Strategies for Continuous Control Optimization

We analyze the efficacy of modern neuro-evolutionary strategies for continuous control optimization. Overall the results collected on a wide variety of qualitatively different benchmark problems indicate that these methods are generally effective and scale well with respect to the number of parameters and the complexity of the problem. We demonstrate the importance of using suitable fitness functions or reward criteria since functions that are optimal for reinforcement learning algorithms tend to be sub-optimal for evolutionary strategies and vice versa. Finally, we provide an analysis of the role of hyper-parameters that demonstrates the importance of normalization techniques, especially in complex problems.