Related papers: Boosting Trust Region Policy Optimization by Norma…

Computer simulation provides an automatic and safe way for training robotic control policies to achieve complex tasks such as locomotion. However, a policy trained in simulation usually does not transfer directly to the real hardware due to…

To ensure stability of learning, state-of-the-art generalized policy iteration algorithms augment the policy improvement step with a trust region constraint bounding the information loss. The size of the trust region is commonly determined…

There is a recent proliferation of research on the integration of machine learning and optimization. One expansive area within this research stream is predictive-model embedded optimization, which proposes the use of pre-trained predictive…

Predictions of global climate models typically operate on coarse spatial scales due to the large computational costs of climate simulations. This has led to a considerable interest in methods for statistical downscaling, a similar process…

Normalizing flows provide an elegant approach to generative modeling that allows for efficient sampling and exact density evaluation of unknown data distributions. However, current techniques have significant limitations in their…

A key problem in reinforcement learning for control with general function approximators (such as deep neural networks and other nonlinear functions) is that, for many algorithms employed in practice, updates to the policy or $Q$-function…

Understanding the dynamics of complex molecular processes is often linked to the study of infrequent transitions between long-lived stable states. The standard approach to the sampling of such rare events is to generate an ensemble of…

Offline reinforcement learning has received extensive attention from scholars because it avoids the interaction between the agent and the environment by learning a policy through a static dataset. However, general reinforcement learning…

Flow Matching (FM) has shown remarkable ability in modeling complex distributions and achieves strong performance in offline imitation learning for cloning expert behaviors. However, despite its behavioral cloning expressiveness, FM-based…

Trust-region algorithms can be applied to very abstract optimization problems because they do not require a specific direction of descent or gradient. This has lead to recent interest in them, in particular in the area of integer optimal…

Sampling-based motion planning is the predominant paradigm in many real-world robotic applications, but its performance is immensely dependent on the quality of the samples. The majority of traditional planners are inefficient as they use…

Normalizing flows are objects used for modeling complicated probability density functions, and have attracted considerable interest in recent years. Many flexible families of normalizing flows have been developed. However, the focus to date…

Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…

We establish a general matched filter principle for order flow normalization: optimal normalization must match the scaling behaviour of the signal-generating process. For capacity-constrained institutional investors, market capitalization…

In this work, we deepen on the use of normalizing flows for causal reasoning. Specifically, we first leverage recent results on non-linear ICA to show that causal models are identifiable from observational data given a causal ordering, and…

We seek to improve deep neural networks by generalizing the pooling operations that play a central role in current architectures. We pursue a careful exploration of approaches to allow pooling to learn and to adapt to complex and variable…

Normalizing flows can generate complex target distributions and thus show promise in many applications in Bayesian statistics as an alternative or complement to MCMC for sampling posteriors. Since no data set from the target posterior…

Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different "contexts". Bayesian optimization approaches to contextual policy search (CPS) offer…

The two key characteristics of a normalizing flow is that it is invertible (in particular, dimension preserving) and that it monitors the amount by which it changes the likelihood of data points as samples are propagated along the network.…

Normalizing flows define a probability distribution by an explicit invertible transformation $\boldsymbol{\mathbf{z}}=f(\boldsymbol{\mathbf{x}})$. In this work, we present implicit normalizing flows (ImpFlows), which generalize normalizing…