Related papers: Diverse Exploration via Conjugate Policies for Pol…

We study an important yet under-addressed problem of quickly and safely improving policies in online reinforcement learning domains. As its solution, we propose a novel exploration strategy - diverse exploration (DE), which learns and…

Scaling reinforcement learning to tens of thousands of parallel environments requires overcoming the limited exploration capacity of a single policy. Ensemble-based policy gradient methods, which employ multiple policies to collect diverse…

Two hitherto disconnected threads of research, diverse exploration (DE) and maximum entropy RL have addressed a wide range of problems facing reinforcement learning algorithms via ostensibly distinct mechanisms. In this work, we identify a…

The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…

Standard reinforcement learning methods aim to master one way of solving a task whereas there may exist multiple near-optimal policies. Being able to identify this collection of near-optimal policies can allow a domain expert to efficiently…

Existing approaches for improving generalization in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have mostly focused on representation learning, neglecting RL-specific aspects such as exploration. We hypothesize that the agent's exploration strategy…

Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…

Existing multi-strategy adaptive differential evolution (DE) commonly involves trials of multiple strategies and then rewards better-performing ones with more resources. However, the trials of an exploitative or explorative strategy may…

The performance of off-policy learning, including deep Q-learning and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), critically depends on the choice of the exploration policy. Existing exploration methods are mostly based on adding noise to…

We consider Bayesian optimization of expensive-to-evaluate experiments that generate vector-valued outcomes over which a decision-maker (DM) has preferences. These preferences are encoded by a utility function that is not known in closed…

The optimization of mixed-variable problems remains a significant challenge. We propose an extension of the policy-based optimization method that handles mixed-variables problems in a natural way, through a simple policy combination. This…

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…

Deep neuroevolution and deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) algorithms are two popular approaches to policy search. The former is widely applicable and rather stable, but suffers from low sample efficiency. By contrast, the latter is more…

Online tree-based search algorithms iteratively simulate trajectories and update action-values for a set of states stored in a tree structure. It works reasonably well in practice but fails to effectively utilise the information gathered…

We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…

We investigate the method of conjugate gradients, exploiting inaccurate matrix-vector products, for the solution of convex quadratic optimization problems. Theoretical performance bounds are derived, and the necessary quantities occurring…

When to solve math problems, most language models take a sampling strategy to predict next word according conditional probabilities. In the math reasoning step, it may generate wrong answer. Considering math problems are deterministic, we…

Adaptive exploration methods propose ways to learn complex policies via alternating between exploration and exploitation. An important question for such methods is to determine the appropriate moment to switch between exploration and…

Data-driven iterative learning control can achieve high performance for systems performing repeating tasks without the need for modeling. The aim of this paper is to develop a fast data-driven method for iterative learning control that is…

The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…