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Related papers: Stein Variational Policy Gradient

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Despite their success, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance of the gradient estimate, which can result in unsatisfactory sample complexity. Recently, numerous variance-reduced extensions of policy gradient methods with provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Matilde Gargiani , Andrea Zanelli , Andrea Martinelli , Tyler Summers , John Lygeros

Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-23 John Schulman , Philipp Moritz , Sergey Levine , Michael Jordan , Pieter Abbeel

This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-26 Lingwei Zhu , Takamitsu Matsubara

Despite their success, large pretrained vision models remain vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting when adapted to new tasks in class-incremental settings. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) alleviates this by restricting trainable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yaqian Zhang , Bernhard Pfahringer , Eibe Frank , Albert Bifet

We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-27 Christoph Reisinger , Wolfgang Stockinger , Yufei Zhang

Policy gradient algorithms have been widely applied to Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning problems in recent years. Regularization with various entropy functions is often used to encourage exploration and improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Haoya Li , Samarth Gupta , Hsiangfu Yu , Lexing Ying , Inderjit Dhillon

We study the estimation of policy gradients for continuous-time systems with known dynamics. By reframing policy learning in continuous-time, we show that it is possible construct a more efficient and accurate gradient estimator. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Samuel Ainsworth , Kendall Lowrey , John Thickstun , Zaid Harchaoui , Siddhartha Srinivasa

Inspired by dynamic programming, we propose Stochastic Virtual Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm where the Virtual Gradient is defined by computational graph and automatic differentiation. The method is computationally efficient and has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-01 Zheng Li , Shi Shu

Reinforcement learning provides a mathematical framework for learning-based control, whose success largely depends on the amount of data it can utilize. The efficient utilization of historical trajectories obtained from previous policies is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Yifan Lin , Yuhao Wang , Enlu Zhou

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Alessandro Montenegro , Leonardo Cesani , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

We propose a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-10 Qiang Liu , Dilin Wang

Pareto Set Learning (PSL) is popular as an efficient approach to obtaining the complete optimal solution in Multi-objective Learning (MOL). A set of optimal solutions approximates the Pareto set, and its mapping is a set of dense points in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Minh-Duc Nguyen , Dung D. Le

Policy gradient algorithms have driven many recent advancements in language model reasoning. An appealing property is their ability to learn from exploration on their own trajectories, a process crucial for fostering diverse and creative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Aleksei Petrenko , Ben Lipkin , Kevin Chen , Erik Wijmans , Marco Cusumano-Towner , Raja Giryes , Philipp Krähenbühl

We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Shalabh Bhatnagar

This paper examines the spatial coverage optimization problem for multiple sensors in a known convex environment, where the coverage service of each sensor is heterogeneous and anisotropic. We introduce the Stein Coverage algorithm, a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Donipolo Ghimire , Solmaz S. Kia

We present Constrained Stein Variational Trajectory Optimization (CSVTO), an algorithm for performing trajectory optimization with constraints on a set of trajectories in parallel. We frame constrained trajectory optimization as a novel…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Thomas Power , Dmitry Berenson

Stock portfolio optimization is the process of constant re-distribution of money to a pool of various stocks. In this paper, we will formulate the problem such that we can apply Reinforcement Learning for the task properly. To maintain a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Le Trung Hieu

We present a mathematical framework and computational methods to optimally design a finite number of sequential experiments. We formulate this sequential optimal experimental design (sOED) problem as a finite-horizon partially observable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Wanggang Shen , Xun Huan