Related papers: Path Integral Policy Improvement with Covariance M…
Recently, a novel class of Approximate Policy Iteration (API) algorithms have demonstrated impressive practical performance (e.g., ExIt from [2], AlphaGo-Zero from [27]). This new family of algorithms maintains, and alternately optimizes,…
When faced with a specific optimization problem, choosing which algorithm to use is always a tough task. Not only is there a vast variety of algorithms to select from, but these algorithms often are controlled by many hyperparameters, which…
Relational Markov Decision Processes are a useful abstraction for complex reinforcement learning problems and stochastic planning problems. Recent work developed representation schemes and algorithms for planning in such problems using the…
The development of Policy Iteration (PI) has inspired many recent algorithms for Reinforcement Learning (RL), including several policy gradient methods that gained both theoretical soundness and empirical success on a variety of tasks. The…
The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is a popular method to deal with nonconvex and/or stochastic optimization problems when the gradient information is not available. Being based on the CMA-ES, the recently proposed…
Continual learning systems face the dual challenge of preventing catastrophic forgetting while maintaining energy efficiency, particularly in resource-constrained environments. This paper introduces Pathway-based Progressive Inference…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
Consider the problem of approximating the optimal policy of a Markov decision process (MDP) by sampling state transitions. In contrast to existing reinforcement learning methods that are based on successive approximations to the nonlinear…
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, PMD…
The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…
Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) algorithms tackle sequential decision problems where agents may have different preferences over (possibly conflicting) reward functions. Such algorithms often learn a set of policies (each…
In this paper we investigate the convergence properties of a variant of the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES). Our study is based on the recent theoretical foundation that the pure rank-mu update CMA-ES performs the…
Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…
Direct policy optimization in reinforcement learning is usually solved with policy-gradient algorithms, which optimize policy parameters via stochastic gradient ascent. This paper provides a new theoretical interpretation and justification…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning but suffers from advantage collapse on ``hard samples'' where all rollouts fail. This lack of variance eliminates crucial learning signals.…
The posterior in probabilistic programs with stochastic support decomposes as a weighted sum of the local posterior distributions associated with each possible program path. We show that making predictions with this full posterior…
How do statistical dependencies in measurement noise influence high-dimensional inference? To answer this, we study the paradigmatic spiked matrix model of principal components analysis (PCA), where a rank-one matrix is corrupted by…
Covariance selection seeks to estimate a covariance matrix by maximum likelihood while restricting the number of nonzero inverse covariance matrix coefficients. A single penalty parameter usually controls the tradeoff between log likelihood…
Reinforcement learning of real-world tasks is very data inefficient, and extensive simulation-based modelling has become the dominant approach for training systems. However, in human-robot interaction and many other real-world settings,…
Various variants of the well known Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) have been proposed recently, which improve the empirical performance of the original algorithm by structural modifications. However, in practice it…