Related papers: ExPoSe: Combining State-Based Exploration with Gra…
Policy-gradient methods are widely used for learning control policies. They can be easily distributed to multiple workers and reach state-of-the-art results in many domains. Unfortunately, they exhibit large variance and subsequently suffer…
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms perform simulation-based search to improve policies online. During search, the simulation policy is adapted to explore the most promising lines of play. MCTS has been used by state-of-the-art…
Policy tree search is a family of tree search algorithms that use a policy to guide the search. These algorithms provide guarantees on the number of expansions required to solve a given problem that are based on the quality of the policy.…
Expert Iteration (ExIt) is an effective framework for learning game-playing policies from self-play. ExIt involves training a policy to mimic the search behaviour of a tree search algorithm - such as Monte-Carlo tree search - and using the…
The process of discovery requires active exploration -- the act of collecting new and informative data. However, efficient autonomous exploration remains a major unsolved problem. The dominant paradigm addresses this challenge by using…
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…
Sequential decision making problems, such as structured prediction, robotic control, and game playing, require a combination of planning policies and generalisation of those plans. In this paper, we present Expert Iteration (ExIt), a novel…
Classical policy gradient (PG) methods in reinforcement learning frequently converge to suboptimal local optima, a challenge exacerbated in large or complex environments. This work investigates Policy Gradient with Tree Search (PGTS), an…
Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are incapable of learning solely from batch offline data without online interactions with the environment, due to the phenomenon known as \textit{extrapolation error}. This is often due…
Reinforcement learning is widely used to improve the reasoning ability of large language models, especially when answers can be automatically checked. Standard GRPO-style training updates the model using only the current step, while full…
Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…
Gradient-based methods are often used for policy optimization in deep reinforcement learning, despite being vulnerable to local optima and saddle points. Although gradient-free methods (e.g., genetic algorithms or evolution strategies) help…
Autonomous exploration has many important applications. However, classic information gain-based or frontier-based exploration only relies on the robot current state to determine the immediate exploration goal, which lacks the capability of…
Proximal Policy Optimization with Adaptive Exploration (axPPO) is introduced as a novel learning algorithm. This paper investigates the exploration-exploitation tradeoff within the context of reinforcement learning and aims to contribute…
Long-horizon planning in realistic environments requires the ability to reason over sequential tasks in high-dimensional state spaces with complex dynamics. Classical motion planning algorithms, such as rapidly-exploring random trees, are…
Decision trees, owing to their interpretability, are attractive as control policies for (dynamical) systems. Unfortunately, constructing, or synthesising, such policies is a challenging task. Previous approaches do so by imitating a…
The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…
We address the challenge of effective exploration while maintaining good performance in policy gradient methods. As a solution, we propose diverse exploration (DE) via conjugate policies. DE learns and deploys a set of conjugate policies…
Despite advancements in deep reinforcement learning algorithms, developing an effective exploration strategy is still an open problem. Most existing exploration strategies either are based on simple heuristics, or require the model of the…
Although deep reinforcement learning methods can learn effective policies for challenging problems such as Atari games and robotics tasks, algorithms are complex, and training times are often long. This study investigates how Evolution…