Related papers: Evolutionary Stochastic Policy Distillation
Many global optimization algorithms of the memetic variety rely on some form of stochastic search, and yet they often lack a sound probabilistic basis. Without a recourse to the powerful tools of stochastic calculus, treading the fine…
Model-free deep-reinforcement-based learning algorithms have been applied to a range of COPs~\cite{bello2016neural}~\cite{kool2018attention}~\cite{nazari2018reinforcement}. However, these approaches suffer from two key challenges when…
Posterior Sampling for Reinforcement Learning (PSRL) is a well-known algorithm that augments model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithms with Thompson sampling. PSRL maintains posterior distributions of the environment transition…
Natural Evolution Strategies (NES) is a promising framework for black-box continuous optimization problems. NES optimizes the parameters of a probability distribution based on the estimated natural gradient, and one of the key parameters…
Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…
In this work we introduce an evolutionary strategy to solve combinatorial optimization tasks, i.e. problems characterized by a discrete search space. In particular, we focus on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), i.e. a famous problem…
This work concerns the evolutionary approaches to distributed stochastic black-box optimization, in which each worker can individually solve an approximation of the problem with nature-inspired algorithms. We propose a distributed evolution…
Evolutionary algorithms are particularly effective for optimisation problems with dynamic and stochastic components. We propose multi-objective evolutionary approaches for the knapsack problem with stochastic profits under static and…
Self-distillation bootstraps large language models (LLMs) by training on their own generations. However, existing methods either rely on external signals to curate self-generated outputs (e.g., correctness filtering, execution feedback, and…
Since its introduction a decade ago, \emph{relative entropy policy search} (REPS) has demonstrated successful policy learning on a number of simulated and real-world robotic domains, not to mention providing algorithmic components used by…
We present in this paper a new approach for polyphonic music transcription using evolution strategies (ES). Automatic music transcription is a complex process that still remains an open challenge. Using an audio signal to be transcribed as…
We introduce State Vector Space Partitioning (SVSP), a novel method to mimic a black box reinforcement learning policy using a set of human-interpretable subpolicies. By partitioning a distillation dataset of state action pairs with linear…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…
We study the sample complexity of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem. We first derive sample complexity bounds when the learner has access to a generative model. We show that there exists a…
Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made significant strides in enabling artificial agents to learn diverse behaviors. However, learning an effective policy often requires a large number of environment interactions. To mitigate sample…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…
Diffusion models have seen rapid adoption in robotic imitation learning, enabling autonomous execution of complex dexterous tasks. However, action synthesis is often slow, requiring many steps of iterative denoising, limiting the extent to…
In this paper, we study a few challenging theoretical and numerical issues on the well known trust region policy optimization for deep reinforcement learning. The goal is to find a policy that maximizes the total expected reward when the…