Congratulations on training a relatively small model that can beat larger models for this important task.

>We ran a genetic algorithm over 30+ diff formats

Can you you give more information about your genetic algorithm? Did you do crossover over the trained models (for example, ranking by fitness, take 20% most elite and create children by mixing their weights randomly)? Did you have a 'population size' (number of instances) for the genetic algorithms, and if so what was it?