Related papers: Contrasting Exploration in Parameter and Action Sp…

Parameter space exploration methods with black-box optimization have recently been shown to outperform state-of-the-art approaches in continuous control reinforcement learning domains. In this paper, we examine reasons why these methods…

Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…

Machine learning has been widely applied in many aspects, but training a machine learning model is increasingly difficult. There are more optimization problems named "black-box" where the relationship between model parameters and outcomes…

Constraining Beyond the Standard Model theories usually involves scanning highly multi-dimensional parameter spaces and check observable predictions against experimental bounds and theoretical constraints. Such task is often timely and…

Unlike the white-box counterparts that are widely studied and readily accessible, adversarial examples in black-box settings are generally more Herculean on account of the difficulty of estimating gradients. Many methods achieve the task by…

Black box optimization requires specifying a search space to explore for solutions, e.g. a d-dimensional compact space, and this choice is critical for getting the best results at a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, determining a high…

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Black-box optimization refers to the optimization problem whose objective function and/or constraint sets are either unknown, inaccessible, or non-existent. In many applications, especially with the involvement of humans, the only way to…

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) enable researchers to solve challenging control problems, from simulated environments to real-world robotic tasks. However, deep RL algorithms are known to be sensitive to the problem…

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Multi-objective optimization is a crucial matter in computer systems design space exploration because real-world applications often rely on a trade-off between several objectives. Derivatives are usually not available or impractical to…

We consider black-box optimization in which only an extremely limited number of function evaluations, on the order of around 100, are affordable and the function evaluations must be performed in even fewer batches of a limited number of…

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Deep learning algorithms have recently shown to be a successful tool in estimating parameters of statistical models for which simulation is easy, but likelihood computation is challenging. But the success of these approaches depends on…

One proposed mechanism to improve exploration in reinforcement learning is through the use of macro-actions. Paradoxically though, in many scenarios the naive addition of macro-actions does not lead to better exploration, but rather the…

Generating adversarial examples in a black-box setting retains a significant challenge with vast practical application prospects. In particular, existing black-box attacks suffer from the need for excessive queries, as it is non-trivial to…

Black-box complexity is a complexity theoretic measure for how difficult a problem is to be optimized by a general purpose optimization algorithm. It is thus one of the few means trying to understand which problems are tractable for genetic…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a successful methodology to optimize black-box functions that are expensive to evaluate. While traditional methods optimize each black-box function in isolation, there has been recent interest in speeding up BO…

We study pure exploration in bandits, where the dimension of the feature representation can be much larger than the number of arms. To overcome the curse of dimensionality, we propose to adaptively embed the feature representation of each…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods generally engage in exploratory behavior through noise injection in the action space. An alternative is to add noise directly to the agent's parameters, which can lead to more consistent exploration…