English
Related papers

Related papers: Policy Learning and Evaluation with Randomized Qua…

200 papers

We present a new Subset Simulation approach using Hamiltonian neural network-based Monte Carlo sampling for reliability analysis. The proposed strategy combines the superior sampling of the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-11 Denny Thaler , Somayajulu L. N. Dhulipala , Franz Bamer , Bernd Markert , Michael D. Shields

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Kaixiang Lin , Jiayu Zhou

Policy gradient based reinforcement learning algorithms coupled with neural networks have shown success in learning complex policies in the model free continuous action space control setting. However, explicitly parameterized policies are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-30 Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-29 John Schulman , Filip Wolski , Prafulla Dhariwal , Alec Radford , Oleg Klimov

Applying probabilistic models to reinforcement learning (RL) enables the application of powerful optimisation tools such as variational inference to RL. However, existing inference frameworks and their algorithms pose significant challenges…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Matthew Fellows , Anuj Mahajan , Tim G. J. Rudner , Shimon Whiteson

We investigate the application of randomized quasi-Monte Carlo (RQMC) methods in random feature approximations for kernel-based learning. Compared to the classical Monte Carlo (MC) approach \citep{rahimi2007random}, RQMC improves the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-09 Yian Huang , Zhen Huang

Many existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods employ stochastic gradient iteration on the back end, whose stability hinges upon a hypothesis that the data-generating process mixes exponentially fast with a rate parameter that appears in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Wesley A. Suttle , Amrit Singh Bedi , Bhrij Patel , Brian M. Sadler , Alec Koppel , Dinesh Manocha

Most methods in reinforcement learning use a Policy Gradient (PG) approach to learn a parametric stochastic policy that maps states to actions. The standard approach is to implement such a mapping via a neural network (NN) whose parameters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Sergio Rozada , Antonio G. Marques

Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-10-23 Benjamin Jourdain , Jérôme Lelong

Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) is a generalization of traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) that aims to optimize multiple, often conflicting objectives simultaneously rather than focusing on a single reward. This approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Davide Guidobene , Lorenzo Benedetti , Diego Arapovic

This study presents a comparative analysis of Monte Carlo (MC) and quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods in the context of derivative pricing, emphasizing convergence rates and the curse of dimensionality. After a concise overview of traditional…

Pricing of Securities · Quantitative Finance 2025-02-26 Giacomo Case

We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

The Plackett-Luce (PL) model is ubiquitous in learning-to-rank (LTR) because it provides a useful and intuitive probabilistic model for sampling ranked lists. Counterfactual offline evaluation and optimization of ranking metrics are pivotal…

We study Reinforcement Learning for partially observable dynamical systems using function approximation. We propose a new \textit{Partially Observable Bilinear Actor-Critic framework}, that is general enough to include models such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Masatoshi Uehara , Ayush Sekhari , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner , Bernhard Schölkopf , Sergey Levine

This paper introduces a set of algorithms for Monte-Carlo Bayesian reinforcement learning. Firstly, Monte-Carlo estimation of upper bounds on the Bayes-optimal value function is employed to construct an optimistic policy. Secondly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-18 Christos Dimitrakakis

Bayesian reinforcement learning (BRL) encodes prior knowledge of the world in a model and represents uncertainty in model parameters by maintaining a probability distribution over them. This paper presents Monte Carlo BRL (MC-BRL), a simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Yi Wang , Kok Sung Won , David Hsu , Wee Sun Lee

Classical reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the expected cumulative rewards. In this work, we consider the RL setting where the goal is to optimize the quantile of the cumulative rewards. We parameterize the policy controlling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Jinyang Jiang , Jiaqiao Hu , Yijie Peng

Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) has driven many recent breakthroughs in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, scaling MCTS to parallel compute has proven challenging in practice which has motivated alternative planners like sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Joery A. de Vries , Jinke He , Yaniv Oren , Matthijs T. J. Spaan