Related papers: Coordinate-wise Control Variates for Deep Policy G…
Vector Quantization (VQ) is a method for discretizing latent representations and has become a major part of the deep learning toolkit. It has been theoretically and empirically shown that discretization of representations leads to improved…
Building on our prior explorations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for financial data processing, this paper introduces two significant enhancements to refine our CNN model's predictive performance and robustness for financial…
Modern policy gradient algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) rely on an arsenal of heuristics, including loss clipping and gradient clipping, to ensure successful learning. These heuristics are reminiscent of techniques from…
Likelihood-based policy gradient methods are the dominant approach for training robot control policies from rewards. These methods rely on differentiable action likelihoods, which constrain policy outputs to simple distributions like…
We introduce a constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses a virtual trust region to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the normal trust…
Based on the continuous interpretation of deep learning cast as an optimal control problem, this paper investigates the benefits of employing B-spline basis functions to parameterize neural network controls across the layers. Rather than…
Monte Carlo estimation in plays a crucial role in stochastic reaction networks. However, reducing the statistical uncertainty of the corresponding estimators requires sampling a large number of trajectories. We propose control variates…
In this paper we present an enhancement of the regression-based variance reduction approaches recently proposed in Belomestny et al. This enhancement is based on a truncation of the control variate and allows for a significant reduction of…
To facilitate efficient learning, policy gradient approaches to deep reinforcement learning (RL) are typically paired with variance reduction measures and strategies for making large but safe policy changes based on a batch of experiences.…
We study the possibility of completing data bases of a sample of governance, diversification and value creation variables by providing a well adapted method to reconstruct the missing parts in order to obtain a complete sample to be applied…
Regression via classification (RvC) is a common method used for regression problems in deep learning, where the target variable belongs to a set of continuous values. By discretizing the target into a set of non-overlapping classes, it has…
Building upon recent developments of force-based estimators with a reduced variance for the computation of densities, radial distribution functions or local transport properties from molecular simulations, we show that the variance can be…
Due to the substantial computational cost, training state-of-the-art deep neural networks for large-scale datasets often requires distributed training using multiple computation workers. However, by nature, workers need to frequently…
This paper considers policy search in continuous state-action reinforcement learning problems. Typically, one computes search directions using a classic expression for the policy gradient called the Policy Gradient Theorem, which decomposes…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…
This paper introduces novel results for the score function gradient estimator of the importance weighted variational bound (IWAE). We prove that in the limit of large $K$ (number of importance samples) one can choose the control variate…
Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…
Reinforcement learning constantly deals with hard integrals, for example when computing expectations in policy evaluation and policy iteration. These integrals are rarely analytically solvable and typically estimated with the Monte Carlo…