Related papers: Effective Reinforcement Learning through Evolution…
Evolutionary Strategies (ES) are known to be an effective black-box optimization technique for deep neural networks when the true gradients cannot be computed, such as in Reinforcement Learning. We continue a recent line of research that…
Many applications in machine learning require optimizing a function whose true gradient is unknown, but where surrogate gradient information (directions that may be correlated with, but not necessarily identical to, the true gradient) is…
Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (ERL) that applying Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) to optimize the weight parameters of Deep Neural Network (DNN) based policies has been widely regarded as an alternative to traditional reinforcement…
Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (ERL), training the Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies with Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), have demonstrated enhanced exploration capabilities and greater robustness than using traditional policy…
This short, written report introduces the idea of Evolutionary Surrogate-Assisted Prescription (ESP) and presents preliminary results on its potential use in training real-world agents as a part of the 1st AI for Drinking Water Chlorination…
High-fidelity simulation models are widely used to analyze complex stochastic systems, but their high computational cost motivates the development of cheaper surrogate models that approximate the simulation model's input-output…
We introduce the concept of decision-focused surrogate modeling for solving computationally challenging nonlinear optimization problems in real-time settings. The proposed data-driven framework seeks to learn a simpler, e.g. convex,…
Decision support systems often rely on solving complex optimization problems that may require to estimate uncertain parameters beforehand. Recent studies have shown how using traditionally trained estimators for this task can lead to…
Optimization models used to make discrete decisions often contain uncertain parameters that are context-dependent and estimated through prediction. To account for the quality of the decision made based on the prediction, decision-focused…
In NeuroEvolution, the topologies of artificial neural networks are optimized with evolutionary algorithms to solve tasks in data regression, data classification, or reinforcement learning. One downside of NeuroEvolution is the large amount…
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…
Evolution Strategy (ES) is a powerful black-box optimization technique based on the idea of natural evolution. In each of its iterations, a key step entails ranking candidate solutions based on some fitness score. For an ES method in…
Sample efficiency in the face of computationally expensive simulations is a common concern in surrogate modeling. Current strategies to minimize the number of samples needed are not as effective in simulated environments with wide state…
Machine learning methods are increasingly used to build computationally inexpensive surrogates for complex physical models. The predictive capability of these surrogates suffers when data are noisy, sparse, or time-dependent. As we are…
Prediction rule ensembles (PRE) provide interpretable prediction models with relatively high accuracy.PRE obtain a large set of decision rules from a (boosted) decision tree ensemble, and achieves sparsitythrough application of…
We propose a new approach for building recommender systems by adapting surrogate-assisted interactive genetic algorithms. A pool of user-evaluated items is used to construct an approximative model which serves as a surrogate fitness…
We investigate a deep reinforcement learning (RL) architecture that supports explaining why a learned agent prefers one action over another. The key idea is to learn action-values that are directly represented via human-understandable…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress across various fields and have exhibited strong potential in evolutionary computation, such as generating new solutions and automating algorithm design. Surrogate-assisted…
The integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) aims at simultaneously exploiting the sample efficiency as well as the diversity and robustness of the two paradigms. Recently, hybrid learning frameworks…
Accurate surrogate construction for PDE-driven high-dimensional rare-event simulation is challenging when performance evaluations are expensive. Since a globally accurate surrogate may require many high-fidelity evaluations, adaptive…