Related papers: Evolution Strategies Converges to Finite Differenc…
Search and recommendation (S&R) are core to online platforms, addressing explicit intent through queries and modeling implicit intent from behaviors, respectively. Their complementary roles motivate a unified modeling paradigm. Early…
In recent years, various powerful policy gradient algorithms have been proposed in deep reinforcement learning. While all these algorithms build on the Policy Gradient Theorem, the specific design choices differ significantly across…
We recently highlighted a fundamental problem recognized to confound algorithmic optimization, namely, \textit{conflating} the objective with the objective function. Even when the former is well defined, the latter may not be obvious, e.g.,…
Recent work from the reinforcement learning community has shown that Evolution Strategies are a fast and scalable alternative to other reinforcement learning methods. In this paper we show that Evolution Strategies are a special case of…
Natural evolutionary strategies (NES) are a family of gradient-free black-box optimization algorithms. This study illustrates their use for the optimization of randomly-initialized parametrized quantum circuits (PQCs) in the region of…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the well-known extragradient (EG) method for solving both equations and inclusions. First, we unify and generalize EG for [non]linear equations to a wider class of algorithms, encompassing…
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as the standard post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs). However, the conventional SFT process, driven by Cross-Entropy (CE) loss, often…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, and MAP-Elites (ME) in particular, have proven very useful for a broad range of applications including enabling real robots to recover quickly from joint damage, solving strongly deceptive maze tasks or…
We study the theoretical capacity to statistically learn local landscape information by Evolution Strategies (ESs). Specifically, we investigate the covariance matrix when constructed by ESs operating with the selection operator alone. We…
Delays and asynchrony are inevitable in large-scale machine-learning problems where communication plays a key role. As such, several works have extensively analyzed stochastic optimization with delayed gradients. However, as far as we are…
It is known that step size adaptive evolution strategies (ES) do not converge (prematurely) to regular points of continuously differentiable objective functions. Among critical points, convergence to minima is desired, and convergence to…
Recurrent spiking neural networks (RSNNs) hold great potential for advancing artificial general intelligence, as they draw inspiration from the biological nervous system and show promise in modeling complex dynamics. However, the…
Evolutionary Computation (EC) has emerged as a powerful field of Artificial Intelligence, inspired by nature's mechanisms of gradual development. However, EC approaches often face challenges such as stagnation, diversity loss, computational…
Portfolio optimization involves determining the optimal allocation of portfolio assets in order to maximize a given investment objective. Traditionally, some form of mean-variance optimization is used with the aim of maximizing returns…
Policy gradient methods, where one searches for the policy of interest by maximizing the value functions using first-order information, become increasingly popular for sequential decision making in reinforcement learning, games, and…
Evolutionary algorithms have been used to evolve a population of actors to generate diverse experiences for training reinforcement learning agents, which helps to tackle the temporal credit assignment problem and improves the exploration…
The population-based optimization algorithms have provided promising results in feature selection problems. However, the main challenges are high time complexity. Moreover, the interaction between features is another big challenge in FS…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of large-scale learning, yet classical analyses rely on assumptions that can be either too strong (bounded variance) or too coarse (uniform noise). The expected smoothness (ES) condition…
It seems that in the current age, computers, computation, and data have an increasingly important role to play in scientific research and discovery. This is reflected in part by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence,…
Big models have achieved revolutionary breakthroughs in the field of AI, but they might also pose potential concerns. Addressing such concerns, alignment technologies were introduced to make these models conform to human preferences and…