evolution

Definition

Used two ways. In survey titles it means historical change — how a family of methods developed over time. In evolutionary algorithms it names a concrete optimisation strategy: generate variations, score them, keep the good ones, repeat. That second sense is gradient-free, which is why it keeps reappearing for things you cannot differentiate through, such as prompts, architectures, and discrete program structure.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Explained: EVISKILL — Rewriting an Agent's Playbook from Replayable EvidenceEVISKILL: Grounding Skill Evolution in Replayable Evidence
• Paper Walkthrough: SceneMosaic — Physically Valid 3D Rooms from One Image, in Minutes, in Many VariationsSceneMosaic: Efficient and Diverse Simulation-Ready Scene Generation via Hybrid Agentic Layout Evolution
• Paper Walkthrough — Beyond Retrieval: LatentStream Turns Retrieved Video Into Latent MemoryBeyond Retrieval: Progressive Latent Memory Evolution for Streaming Video Understanding