Related papers: Biased Aggregation, Rollout, and Enhanced Policy I…
For reinforcement learning on complex stochastic systems where many factors dynamically impact the output trajectories, it is desirable to effectively leverage the information from historical samples collected in previous iterations to…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive reasoning performance, with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) emerging as a standard paradigm for post-training. A representative algorithm, group relative policy…
We present a novel framework for dynamic cut aggregation in L-shaped algorithms. The aim is to improve the parallel performance of distributed L-shaped algorithms through reduced communication latency and load imbalance. We show how…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a powerful technique for aligning generative models, but its effectiveness is bottlenecked by the conflict between large group sizes and prohibitive computational costs. In this work, we…
Many large MDPs can be represented compactly using a dynamic Bayesian network. Although the structure of the value function does not retain the structure of the process, recent work has shown that value functions in factored MDPs can often…
We present an iterative framework to improve the amortized approximations of posterior distributions in the context of Bayesian inverse problems, which is inspired by loop-unrolled gradient descent methods and is theoretically grounded in…
In this paper we discuss $\l$-policy iteration, a method for exact and approximate dynamic programming. It is intermediate between the classical value iteration (VI) and policy iteration (PI) methods, and it is closely related to optimistic…
Group-based policy optimization methods like GRPO and GSPO have become standard for training multimodal models, leveraging group-wise rollouts and relative advantage estimation. However, they suffer from a critical \emph{gradient vanishing}…
We present an end-to-end framework for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) using reinforcement learning. In this approach, we train a single model that finds near-optimal solutions for problem instances sampled from a given…
Distributed learning paradigms, such as federated and decentralized learning, allow for the coordination of models across a collection of agents, and without the need to exchange raw data. Instead, agents compute model updates locally based…
Gradient boosting is a prediction method that iteratively combines weak learners to produce a complex and accurate model. From an optimization point of view, the learning procedure of gradient boosting mimics a gradient descent on a…
Determining the most appropriate features for machine learning predictive models is challenging regarding performance and feature acquisition costs. In particular, global feature choice is limited given that some features will only benefit…
Deep Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms employ value networks to drive the learning of parameterized policies and reduce the variance of the gradient estimates. However, value function approximation gets stuck in local optima and struggles to…
Solving portfolio management problems using deep reinforcement learning has been getting much attention in finance for a few years. We have proposed a new method using experts signals and historical price data to feed into our reinforcement…
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…
Critic-free reinforcement learning methods, particularly group policies, have attracted considerable attention for their efficiency in complex tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on multiple sampling and comparisons within the policy…
Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) is a methodology to solve multi-stage stochastic optimization problems in multi-dimensional discrete or continuous spaces. ADP approximates the optimal value function by adaptively sampling both action…
This paper introduces two novel modifications to the Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm [1], approached from a mixed-policy perspective. Standard policy gradient methods can suffer from instability and sample…
We consider approximate dynamic programming in $\gamma$-discounted Markov decision processes and apply it to approximate planning with linear value-function approximation. Our first contribution is a new variant of Approximate Policy…
We propose a clustering-based iterative algorithm to solve certain optimization problems in machine learning, where we start the algorithm by aggregating the original data, solving the problem on aggregated data, and then in subsequent…