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Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have made important achievements in many control tasks, they still suffer from the problems of sample inefficiency and unstable training process, which are usually caused by sparse…
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…
Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a scalable gradient-free alternative to reinforcement learning based LLM fine-tuning, but it remains unclear whether comparable task performance implies comparable solutions in parameter space. We…
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…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
Because stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has shown promise optimizing neural networks with millions of parameters and few if any alternatives are known to exist, it has moved to the heart of leading approaches to reinforcement learning…
Deep artificial neural networks (DNNs) are typically trained via gradient-based learning algorithms, namely backpropagation. Evolution strategies (ES) can rival backprop-based algorithms such as Q-learning and policy gradients on…
Evolutionary algorithms (EA), a class of stochastic search methods based on the principles of natural evolution, have received widespread acclaim for their exceptional performance in various real-world optimization problems. While…
In recent years, Evolutionary Strategies were actively explored in robotic tasks for policy search as they provide a simpler alternative to reinforcement learning algorithms. However, this class of algorithms is often claimed to be…
Reinforcement learning for control over continuous spaces typically uses high-entropy stochastic policies, such as Gaussian distributions, for local exploration and estimating policy gradient to optimize performance. Many robotic control…
Evolution strategies (ESs) are zeroth-order stochastic black-box optimization heuristics invariant to monotonic transformations of the objective function. They evolve a multivariate normal distribution, from which candidate solutions are…
We explore the use of Evolution Strategies (ES), a class of black box optimization algorithms, as an alternative to popular MDP-based RL techniques such as Q-learning and Policy Gradients. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari show that ES is a…
Evolutionary Strategies (ES) are a popular family of black-box zeroth-order optimization algorithms which rely on search distributions to efficiently optimize a large variety of objective functions. This paper investigates the potential…
Improving competent robot policies with on-policy RL is often hampered by noisy, low-signal gradients. We revisit Evolution Strategies (ES) as a policy-gradient proxy and localize exploration with bounded, antithetic triangular…
Evolution Strategies (ES) emerged as a scalable alternative to popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques, providing an almost perfect speedup when distributed across hundreds of CPU cores thanks to a reduced communication overhead.…
One of the biggest missing capabilities in current AI systems is the ability to learn continuously after deployment. Implementing such continually learning systems have several challenges, one of which is the large memory requirement of…
Recently reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for quadrupedal locomotion, which can save the manual effort in conventional approaches such as designing skill-specific controllers. However, due to the complex…
We present a simple, sample-efficient algorithm for introducing large but directed learning steps in reinforcement learning (RL), through the use of evolutionary operators. The methodology uses a population of RL agents training with a…
Policy gradient reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved impressive performance in challenging learning tasks such as continuous control, but suffer from high sample complexity. Experience replay is a commonly used approach to…
Evolution Strategy (ES) algorithms have shown promising results in training complex robotic control policies due to their massive parallelism capability, simple implementation, effective parameter-space exploration, and fast training time.…