English
Related papers

Related papers: Policy-based optimization: single-step policy grad…

200 papers

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have seen remarkable progress, but key challenges remain. Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is known for ensuring monotonic policy improvement through conservative updates within a trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Zhengpeng Xie , Qiang Zhang , Fan Yang , Marco Hutter , Renjing Xu

Proximal policy optimization(PPO) has been proposed as a first-order optimization method for reinforcement learning. We should notice that an exterior penalty method is used in it. Often, the minimizers of the exterior penalty functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Cheng Zeng , Hongming Zhang

Reinforcement learning is essential for neural architecture search and hyperparameter optimization, but the conventional approaches impede widespread use due to prohibitive time and computational costs. Inspired by DeepSeek-V3 multi-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Zheng Li , Jerry Cheng , Huanying Helen Gu

We introduce Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO), an actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning in continuous action spaces. WPO can be derived as an approximation to Wasserstein gradient flow over the space of all policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 David Pfau , Ian Davies , Diana Borsa , Joao G. M. Araujo , Brendan Tracey , Hado van Hasselt

Knowing the learning dynamics of policy is significant to unveiling the mysteries of Reinforcement Learning (RL). It is especially crucial yet challenging to Deep RL, from which the remedies to notorious issues like sample inefficiency and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Hongyao Tang , Min Zhang , Jianye Hao

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from three core difficulties: temporal credit assignment with sparse rewards, lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Shauharda Khadka , Kagan Tumer

Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Jingbin Liu , Xinyang Gu , Shuai Liu

Black-box optimization (BBO) has become increasingly relevant for tackling complex decision-making problems, especially in public policy domains such as police redistricting. However, its broader application in public policymaking is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-23 Wenqian Xing , JungHo Lee , Chong Liu , Shixiang Zhu

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have recently been integrated to take the advantage of the both methods for better exploration and exploitation.The evolutionary part in these hybrid methods maintains a…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Yan Ma , Tianxing Liu , Bingsheng Wei , Yi Liu , Kang Xu , Wei Li

In this work we introduce the application of black-box quantum control as an interesting rein- forcement learning problem to the machine learning community. We analyze the structure of the reinforcement learning problems arising in quantum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-16 Moritz August , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Most reinforcement learning algorithms seek a single optimal strategy that solves a given task. However, it can often be valuable to learn a diverse set of solutions, for instance, to make an agent's interaction with users more engaging, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Wentse Chen , Shiyu Huang , Yuan Chiang , Tim Pearce , Wei-Wei Tu , Ting Chen , Jun Zhu

A fundamental challenge in model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) lies in the trade-off between generalization and robustness against exploitation errors in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions. While OOD samples may capture valid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hongqiang Lin , Dongxu Zhang , Yiding Sun , Mingzhe Li , Ning Yang , Haijun Zhang

Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Xiangfeng Luo , Tong Liu , Shaorong Xie , Jianshu Wang , Wei Wang , Yang Li , Yan Peng

Policy gradient (PG) is a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that optimizes a parameterized policy model for an expected return using gradient ascent. While PG can work well even in non-Markovian environments, it may encounter plateaus or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Tetsuro Morimura , Kazuhiro Ota , Kenshi Abe , Peinan Zhang

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

Training generally capable agents that thoroughly explore their environment and learn new and diverse skills is a long-term goal of robot learning. Quality Diversity Reinforcement Learning (QD-RL) is an emerging research area that blends…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Sumeet Batra , Bryon Tjanaka , Matthew C. Fontaine , Aleksei Petrenko , Stefanos Nikolaidis , Gaurav Sukhatme

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms often require a large amount of data and struggle in sparse-reward domains with long planning horizons and multiple sub-goals. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic extension of Proximal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Simone Murari , Celeste Veronese , Daniele Meli

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) tackles sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints, which are often formulated as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

We evaluate benchmark deep reinforcement learning algorithms on the task of portfolio optimisation using simulated data. The simulator to generate the data is based on correlated geometric Brownian motion with the Bertsimas-Lo market impact…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Chung I Lu

Deep neuroevolution and deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) algorithms are two popular approaches to policy search. The former is widely applicable and rather stable, but suffers from low sample efficiency. By contrast, the latter is more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Aloïs Pourchot , Olivier Sigaud