Fitting a neural texture decoder with ES (no backprop)

A developer prototyped a toy neural texture compression system trained entirely with Evolution Strategies, avoiding backpropagation and derivatives. The setup pairs a 128×128×8 latent texture with a 1035-weight MLP decoder to reconstruct a 512×512 image at 32.2 dB PSNR, with the latent quantizing to 8 bits at only 0.04 dB loss. Training took 150 seconds on CPU using a single ~600-line C++ file.