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Related papers: Evolutionary Stochastic Policy Distillation

200 papers

On-policy self-distillation trains a reasoning model on its own rollouts while a teacher, often the same model conditioned on privileged context, provides dense token-level supervision. Existing objectives typically weight the teacher's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Junlong Ke , Zichen Wen , Weijia Li , Conghui He , Linfeng Zhang

We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Rein Houthooft , Richard Y. Chen , Phillip Isola , Bradly C. Stadie , Filip Wolski , Jonathan Ho , Pieter Abbeel

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Reinforcement learning can solve decision-making problems and train an agent to behave in an environment according to a predesigned reward function. However, such an approach becomes very problematic if the reward is too sparse and so the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Matej Pecháč , Michal Chovanec , Igor Farkaš

Autonomous learning of robotic skills can allow general-purpose robots to learn wide behavioral repertoires without requiring extensive manual engineering. However, robotic skill learning methods typically make one of several trade-offs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-07 William Montgomery , Anurag Ajay , Chelsea Finn , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Adrien Bolland , Ioannis Boukas , Mathias Berger , Damien Ernst

Evolution Strategies (ESs) have recently become popular for training deep neural networks, in particular on reinforcement learning tasks, a special form of controller design. Compared to classic problems in continuous direct search, deep…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-07-03 Nils Müller , Tobias Glasmachers

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on exploration to discover new behaviors, which is typically achieved by following a stochastic policy. In continuous control tasks, policies with a Gaussian distribution have been widely adopted.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Dmytro Korenkevych , A. Rupam Mahmood , Gautham Vasan , James Bergstra

Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of black-box optimization algorithms able to train deep neural networks roughly as well as Q-learning and policy gradient methods on challenging deep reinforcement learning (RL) problems, but are much…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Edoardo Conti , Vashisht Madhavan , Felipe Petroski Such , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

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…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Niru Maheswaranathan , Luke Metz , George Tucker , Dami Choi , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

This paper proposes a novel evolutionary algorithm called Epistocracy which incorporates human socio-political behavior and intelligence to solve complex optimization problems. The inspiration of the Epistocracy algorithm originates from a…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Seyed Ziae Mousavi Mojab , Seyedmohammad Shams , Hamid Soltanian-Zadeh , Farshad Fotouhi

Online off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is shaped by two coupled choices: the policy class and the update rule. Gaussian policies are fast and have tractable entropy, but struggle with multimodal action distributions. Generative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Zeyuan Wang , Da Li , Yulin Chen , Yuehu Gong , Yanming Guo , Ye Shi , Liang Bai , Tianyuan Yu , Yanwei Fu

Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) have been successfully used for the optimization of neural networks for policy search, but they still remain sample inefficient and underperforming in some cases compared to gradient-based reinforcement learning…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Paul Templier , Emmanuel Rachelson , Antoine Cully , Dennis G. Wilson

Value function approximation is a crucial module for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning when the state space is large or continuous. The present paper takes a generative perspective on policy evaluation via temporal-difference (TD)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-03 Qin Lu , Georgios B. Giannakis

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Ethan Hirschowitz , Fabio Ramos

Evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is an important solution concept in game theory which has been applied frequently to biological models. Informally an ESS is a strategy that if followed by the population cannot be taken over by a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-01-18 Sam Ganzfried

Unrolled computation graphs arise in many scenarios, including training RNNs, tuning hyperparameters through unrolled optimization, and training learned optimizers. Current approaches to optimizing parameters in such computation graphs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Paul Vicol , Luke Metz , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

This paper proposed a discrete stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) model for sustainable ecosystem (SE) planning of the Loess Plateau in Northwestern, China, and analyzed the ecological resource planning by the evolutionary game model in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-06-04 Yuan Zhang

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…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-10-14 Florian Meier , Asier Mujika , Marcelo Matheus Gauy , Angelika Steger

In this work, we study the social learning problem, in which agents of a networked system collaborate to detect the state of the nature based on their private signals. A novel distributed graphical evolutionary game theoretic learning…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-05-24 Xuanyu Cao , K. J. Ray Liu