Gradient Descent Emerges via Natural Selection
Ailun Shen · 2025
Backed by sophisticated neural networks (NNs) that simulate the functions of the human brain, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has positioned itself to address complex problems in intelligence, as evidenced by recent breakthroughs such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers [31]. At the heart of AI learning lies gradient descent, a foundational optimization approach that underpins the well-known backpropagation algorithm. Interestingly, little is known about how the human brain's synapses adjust their strength during learning. A recent article [1] co-authored by Nobel laureate and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton hypothesizes that the slow evolution of genes may have driven the brain to approximate the computation of gradients necessary for efficient learning. Motivated by this hypothesis, a genetic programming (GP), ExprTree, was developed to simulate evolutionary processes and evolve gradient functions, which were applied to train artificial neural networks, replacing the gradients typically used in backpropagation. Experimental results demonstrate that, through the survival of the fittest, the genetic algorithm evolves functions that closely approximate gradient calculations, enabling the convergence of learning tasks. Furthermore, this evolved-function approach aligns with Hebbian learning principles [16] and offers the possibility of low energy consumption. This research provided the first quantitative evidence that gradient descent can naturally emerge as a result of evolutionary processes within neural networks' learning framework.