Related papers: Qualitative Differences Between Evolutionary Strat…

The performance of modern reinforcement learning algorithms critically relies on tuning ever-increasing numbers of hyperparameters. Often, small changes in a hyperparameter can lead to drastic changes in performance, and different…

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…

Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…

Evolutionary algorithms have been used to evolve a population of actors to generate diverse experiences for training reinforcement learning agents, which helps to tackle the temporal credit assignment problem and improves the exploration…

Not all generate-and-test search algorithms are created equal. Bayesian Optimization (BO) invests a lot of computation time to generate the candidate solution that best balances the predicted value and the uncertainty given all previous…

The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…

Benchmark datasets are crucial for evaluating approaches to scheduling or dispatching in the semiconductor industry during the development and deployment phases. However, commonly used benchmark datasets like the Minifab or SMT2020 lack the…

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,…

Evolutionary algorithms, such as Differential Evolution, excel in solving real-parameter optimization challenges. However, the effectiveness of a single algorithm varies across different problem instances, necessitating considerable efforts…

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Reinforcement Learning algorithms aim to learn optimal control strategies through iterative interactions with an environment. A critical element in this process is the experience replay buffer, which stores past experiences, allowing the…

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning has proven highly effective for complex decision-making problems, it demands significant computational resources and careful parameter adjustment in order to develop successful strategies. Evolution…

In Evolutionary Robotics a population of solutions is evolved to optimize robots that solve a given task. However, in traditional Evolutionary Algorithms, the population of solutions tends to converge to local optima when the problem is…

Solving a reinforcement learning problem typically involves correctly prespecifying the reward signal from which the algorithm learns. Here, we approach the problem of reward signal design by using an evolutionary approach to perform a…

Large Reasoning Models are typically trained via reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). However, existing approaches adopt fixed weights for positive and negative samples, and the conclusions hardly generalize to open-ended…

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is commonly used in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with downstream tasks. This paper investigates the feasibility of using PPO for direct reinforcement…

Single-trajectory reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to optimize policies from datasets consisting of (prompt, response, reward) triplets, where scalar rewards are directly available. This supervision format is highly practical, as it…

In importance sampling (IS)-based reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), IS weights are typically clipped to avoid large variance in learning. However, policy update from clipped statistics induces…

We evaluate benchmark deep reinforcement learning algorithms on the task of portfolio optimisation using simulated data. The simulator to generate the data is based on correlated geometric Brownian motion with the Bertsimas-Lo market impact…

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