Related papers: Policy Gradient as a Proxy for Dynamic Oracles in …

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…

In modern decentralized applications, ensuring communication efficiency and privacy for the users are the key challenges. In order to train machine-learning models, the algorithm has to communicate to the data center and sample data for its…

We introduce the first direct policy search algorithm which provably converges to the globally optimal $\textit{dynamic}$ filter for the classical problem of predicting the outputs of a linear dynamical system, given noisy, partial…

This paper develops negative curvature methods for continuous nonlinear unconstrained optimization in stochastic settings, in which function, gradient, and Hessian information is available only through probabilistic oracles, i.e., oracles…

We present a new self-supervised machine learning approach for symbolic simplification of complex mathematical expressions. Training data is generated by scrambling simple expressions and recording the inverse operations, creating oracle…

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…

Proactive Recommender Systems (PRSs) aim to guide user preference shift toward target items by generating paths of intermediate recommendations. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled framework for optimizing such sequential…

We introduce Phasic Policy Gradient (PPG), a reinforcement learning framework which modifies traditional on-policy actor-critic methods by separating policy and value function training into distinct phases. In prior methods, one must choose…

Advances in numerical optimization have supported breakthroughs in several areas of signal processing. This paper focuses on the recent enhanced variants of the proximal gradient numerical optimization algorithm, which combine quasi-Newton…

We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…

Many currently deployed Reinforcement Learning agents work in an environment shared with humans, be them co-workers, users or clients. It is desirable that these agents adjust to people's preferences, learn faster thanks to their help, and…

Fine-tuning pretrained models has become a standard approach to adapting pretrained knowledge to improve the accuracy on new sparse, imbalance datasets. However, issues arise when optimization falls into a collapsed state, where the model…

In recent years, Evolutionary Strategies were actively explored in robotic tasks for policy search as they provide a simpler alternative to reinforcement learning algorithms. However, this class of algorithms is often claimed to be…

Uniform random exploration in decision-making systems supports off-policy learning via supervision but incurs high regret, making it impractical for many applications. Conversely, non-uniform exploration offers better immediate performance…

Diffusion models have demonstrated empirical successes in various applications and can be adapted to task-specific needs via guidance. This paper studies a form of gradient guidance for adapting a pre-trained diffusion model towards…

We observe that several existing policy gradient methods (such as vanilla policy gradient, PPO, A2C) may suffer from overly large gradients when the current policy is close to deterministic (even in some very simple environments), leading…

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…

We present a predictor-corrector framework, called PicCoLO, that can transform a first-order model-free reinforcement or imitation learning algorithm into a new hybrid method that leverages predictive models to accelerate policy learning.…

Task-specific scores are often used to optimize for and evaluate the performance of conditional text generation systems. However, such scores are non-differentiable and cannot be used in the standard supervised learning paradigm. Hence,…

Real-world control systems require policies that are not only high-performing but also interpretable and robust. A promising direction toward this goal is model-based control, which learns system dynamics and cost functions from historical…