English
Related papers

Related papers: Shaped Policy Search for Evolutionary Strategies u…

200 papers

Designing optimal controllers continues to be challenging as systems are becoming complex and are inherently nonlinear. The principal advantage of reinforcement learning (RL) is its ability to learn from the interaction with the environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-05 Savinay Nagendra , Nikhil Podila , Rashmi Ugarakhod , Koshy George

As modern air combat evolves toward beyond-visual-range (BVR) multi-aircraft cooperative engagements, autonomous decision-making for unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) faces significant challenges due to high-dimensional state spaces,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Chengwei Li , Junlin Liu , Yang Gao

Evolution Strategies (ES) is a class of powerful black-box optimisation methods that are highly parallelisable and can handle non-differentiable and noisy objectives. However, na\"ive ES becomes prohibitively expensive at scale on GPUs due…

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is managing the exploration-exploitation trade-off without sacrificing sample efficiency. Policy gradient (PG) methods excel in exploitation through fine-grained, gradient-based optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Zelal Su "Lain" Mustafaoglu , Keshav Pingali , Risto Miikkulainen

When learning to behave in a stochastic environment where safety is critical, such as driving a vehicle in traffic, it is natural for human drivers to plan fallback strategies as a backup to use if ever there is an unexpected change in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Ugo Lecerf , Christelle Yemdji-Tchassi , Sébastien Aubert , Pietro Michiardi

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully solve a wide range of sequential decision problems. However, learning policies that can generalize predictably across multiple tasks in a setting with non-Markovian reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , David Kuric , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez , Herke van Hoof

The ability to autonomously explore and resolve tasks with minimal human guidance is crucial for the self-development of embodied intelligence. Although reinforcement learning methods can largely ease human effort, it's challenging to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Changxin Huang , Yanbin Chang , Junfan Lin , Junyang Liang , Runhao Zeng , Jianqiang Li

We investigate the task of learning to follow natural language instructions by jointly reasoning with visual observations and language inputs. In contrast to existing methods which start with learning from demonstrations (LfD) and then use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Wenhan Xiong , Xiaoxiao Guo , Mo Yu , Shiyu Chang , Bowen Zhou , William Yang Wang

Solving the Goal-Conditioned Reward Sparse (GCRS) task is a challenging reinforcement learning problem due to the sparsity of reward signals. In this work, we propose a new formulation of GCRS tasks from the perspective of the drifted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Hao Sun , Xinyu Pan , Bo Dai , Dahua Lin , Bolei Zhou

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been successfully applied to optimize the policies for Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks due to their exploration ability. The recently proposed Negatively Correlated Search (NCS) provides a distinct…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Hu Zhang , Peng Yang , Yanglong Yu , Mingjia Li , Ke Tang

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is widely used in task-oriented dialogue systems to optimize dialogue policy, but it struggles to balance exploration and exploitation due to the high dimensionality of state and action spaces. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Yangyang Zhao , Ben Niu , Libo Qin , Shihan Wang

Despite the numerous applications and success of deep reinforcement learning in many control tasks, it still suffers from many crucial problems and limitations, including temporal credit assignment with sparse reward, absence of effective…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Marzieh Sadat Esmaeeli , Hamed Malek

This research focuses on enhancing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by integrating penalty functions to guide agents in avoiding unwanted actions while optimizing rewards. The goal is to improve the learning process by ensuring that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Sai Gana Sandeep Pula , Sathish A. P. Kumar , Sumit Jha , Arvind Ramanathan

To enhance the interpretability of Reinforcement Learning (RL), we propose Revealing Evolutionary Action Consequence Trajectories (REACT). In contrast to the prevalent practice of validating RL models based on their optimal behavior learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Philipp Altmann , Céline Davignon , Maximilian Zorn , Fabian Ritz , Claudia Linnhoff-Popien , Thomas Gabor

In this paper, we consider the problem of path finding for a set of homogeneous and autonomous agents navigating a previously unknown stochastic environment. In our problem setting, each agent attempts to maximize a given utility function…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Sheryl Paul , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Evolution Strategies are inspired in biology and part of a larger research field known as Evolutionary Algorithms. Those strategies perform a random search in the space of admissible functions, aiming to optimize some given objective…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2007-12-30 Pedro A. F. Cruz , Delfim F. M. Torres

Often times in imitation learning (IL), the environment we collect expert demonstrations in and the environment we want to deploy our learned policy in aren't exactly the same (e.g. demonstrations collected in simulation but deployment in…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Silvia Sapora , Gokul Swamy , Chris Lu , Yee Whye Teh , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster

We address the problem of fine-tuning pre-trained generative policies with reinforcement learning (RL) while preserving the multimodality of their action distributions. Existing methods for RL fine-tuning of generative policies (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Alberta Longhini , David Emukpere , Jean-Michel Renders , Seungsu Kim

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal