Related papers: A Cross Entropy based Stochastic Approximation Alg…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an indispensable paradigm for enhancing reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, standard policy optimization methods, such as Group Relative Policy…

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

This work studies discrete-time discounted Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces and addresses the inverse problem of inferring a cost function from observed optimal behavior. We first consider the case in which…

In e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and TaoBao, ranking items in a search session is a typical multi-step decision-making problem. Learning to rank (LTR) methods have been widely applied to ranking problems. However, such methods often…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Execution algorithms are vital to modern trading, they enable market participants to execute large orders while minimising market impact and transaction costs. As these algorithms grow more sophisticated, optimising them becomes…

We introduce a new approximate solution technique for first-order Markov decision processes (FOMDPs). Representing the value function linearly w.r.t. a set of first-order basis functions, we compute suitable weights by casting the…

We present a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to find an optimal policy for a finite-horizon Markov decision process while guaranteeing a desired lower bound on the probability of satisfying a signal temporal logic (STL)…

Recent reinforcement learning has enhanced the flow matching models on human preference alignment. While stochastic sampling enables the exploration of denoising directions, existing methods which optimize over multiple denoising steps…

Sampling algorithms drive probabilistic machine learning, and recent years have seen an explosion in the diversity of tools for this task. However, the increasing sophistication of sampling algorithms is correlated with an increase in the…

Entropy Search (ES) and Predictive Entropy Search (PES) are popular and empirically successful Bayesian Optimization techniques. Both rely on a compelling information-theoretic motivation, and maximize the information gained about the…

Off-Policy reinforcement learning (RL) is an important class of methods for many problem domains, such as robotics, where the cost of collecting data is high and on-policy methods are consequently intractable. Standard methods for applying…

This study addresses a gap in the utilization of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques in solving the Stochastic Vehicle Routing Problem (SVRP) that involves the challenging task of optimizing vehicle routes under…

Inverse reinforcement learning aims to infer the reward function that explains expert behavior observed through trajectories of state--action pairs. A long-standing difficulty in classical IRL is the non-uniqueness of the recovered reward:…

In this paper, a safe and learning-based control framework for model predictive control (MPC) is proposed to optimize nonlinear systems with a non-differentiable objective function under uncertain environmental disturbances. The control…

Since the 1990s, considerable empirical work has been carried out to train statistical models, such as neural networks (NNs), as learned heuristics for combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. When successful, such an approach eliminates…

We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…

In this paper, we focus on the problem of robustifying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with respect to model uncertainties. Indeed, in the framework of model-based RL, we propose to merge the theory of constrained Markov decision…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Recent works in high-dimensional model-predictive control and model-based reinforcement learning with learned dynamics and reward models have resorted to population-based optimization methods, such as the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM), for…