Related papers: Coordinate-wise Control Variates for Deep Policy G…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
In this work, we develop a reduced-basis approach for the efficient computation of parametrized expected values, for a large number of parameter values, using the control variate method to reduce the variance. Two algorithms are proposed to…
Stochastic gradient-based optimisation for discrete latent variable models is challenging due to the high variance of gradients. We introduce a variance reduction technique for score function estimators that makes use of double control…
Control variates are variance reduction techniques for Monte Carlo estimators. They play a critical role in improving Monte Carlo estimators in scientific and machine learning applications that involve computationally expensive integrals.…
The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…
Offline reinforcement learning provides a viable approach to obtain advanced control strategies for dynamical systems, in particular when direct interaction with the environment is not available. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual…
Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales…
Gradient-based optimization methods are commonly used to identify local optima in high-dimensional spaces. When derivatives cannot be evaluated directly, stochastic estimators can provide approximate gradients. However, these estimators'…
Policy gradient methods are very attractive in reinforcement learning due to their model-free nature and convergence guarantees. These methods, however, suffer from high variance in gradient estimation, resulting in poor sample efficiency.…
The quantile varying coefficient (VC) model can flexibly capture dynamical patterns of regression coefficients. In addition, due to the quantile check loss function, it is robust against outliers and heavy-tailed distributions of the…
We propose a method for designing policies for convex stochastic control problems characterized by random linear dynamics and convex stage cost. We consider policies that employ quadratic approximate value functions as a substitute for the…
Multivariate functions encountered in high-dimensional uncertainty quantification problems often vary most strongly along a few dominant directions in the input parameter space. We propose a gradient-based method for detecting these…
We introduce a novel policy learning method that integrates analytical gradients from differentiable environments with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To incorporate analytical gradients into the PPO framework, we…
Several authors have recently developed risk-sensitive policy gradient methods that augment the standard expected cost minimization problem with a measure of variability in cost. These studies have focused on specific risk-measures, such as…
We introduce a variational algorithm to estimate the likelihood of a rare event within a nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulation through the evaluation of an optimal control force. Optimization of a control force within a chosen basis…
Modern language models often need to optimize a primary accuracy objective while also accommodating secondary behavioral preferences, such as verbosity, agreeableness, or the level of technical expertise in its response. In practice, a base…
The task of estimating the gradient of a function in the presence of noise is central to several forms of reinforcement learning, including policy search methods. We present two techniques for reducing gradient estimation errors in the…
Black-box variational inference performance is sometimes hindered by the use of gradient estimators with high variance. This variance comes from two sources of randomness: Data subsampling and Monte Carlo sampling. While existing control…
Variational Quantum Circuits are being used as versatile Quantum Machine Learning models. Some empirical results exhibit an advantage in supervised and generative learning tasks. However, when applied to Reinforcement Learning, less is…
Approximate inference in complex probabilistic models such as deep Gaussian processes requires the optimisation of doubly stochastic objective functions. These objectives incorporate randomness both from mini-batch subsampling of the data…