English
Related papers

Related papers: Interpolating Between Softmax Policy Gradient and …

200 papers

Policy gradient and actor-critic algorithms form the basis of many commonly used training techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Using these algorithms in multiagent environments poses problems such as nonstationarity and instability.…

Policy gradient (PG) estimators are ineffective in dealing with softmax policies that are sub-optimally saturated, which refers to the situation when the policy concentrates its probability mass on sub-optimal actions. Sub-optimal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Shivam Garg , Samuele Tosatto , Yangchen Pan , Martha White , A. Rupam Mahmood

Implicit bias induced by gradient-based algorithms is essential to the generalization of overparameterized models, yet its mechanisms can be subtle. This work leverages the Normalized Steepest Descent} (NSD) framework to investigate how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Shengping Xie , Zekun Wu , Quan Chen , Kaixu Tang

Deep neural network (DNN) generally takes thousands of iterations to optimize via gradient descent and thus has a slow convergence. In addition, softmax, as a decision layer, may ignore the distribution information of the data during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Rui Zhang , Ziheng Jiao , Hongyuan Zhang , Xuelong Li

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a scalable paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, its effectiveness is fundamentally limited by exploration: the policy can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Chanuk Lee , Sangwoo Park , Minki Kang , Sung Ju Hwang

In this paper, we address the contextual dueling bandit problem by proposing variance-aware algorithms that leverage neural networks to approximate nonlinear utility functions. Our approach employs a \textit{variance-aware exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Youngmin Oh , Jinje Park , Taejin Paik , Jaemin Park

Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Craig Boutilier , Chih-Wei Hsu , Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Csaba Szepesvari , Manzil Zaheer

We establish a link between a class of discrete choice models and the theory of online learning and multi-armed bandits. Our contributions are: (i) sublinear regret bounds for a broad algorithmic family, encompassing Exp3 as a special case;…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Emerson Melo , David Müller

Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm is one of the most well-known reinforcement learning methods. However, this method is inefficient and unstable in practical applications. On the other hand, the bias and variance of the Q…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Shuai Han , Wenbo Zhou , Shuai Lü , Jiayu Yu

Accurate and efficient simulation of modern robots remains challenging due to their high degrees of freedom and intricate mechanisms. Neural simulators have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional analytical simulators, capable of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Jie Xu , Eric Heiden , Iretiayo Akinola , Dieter Fox , Miles Macklin , Yashraj Narang

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Alekh Agarwal , Mikael Henaff , Sham Kakade , Wen Sun

Neural collapse (NC) describes the structured geometry that emerges in the features and weights of trained classifiers. Recent theory suggests NC can be suboptimal in deep architectures, attributing this to an explicit low-rank bias from L2…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Connall Garrod , Jonathan P. Keating , Christos Thrampoulidis

Machine unlearning in neural information retrieval (IR) systems requires removing specific data whilst maintaining model performance. Applying existing machine unlearning methods to IR may compromise retrieval effectiveness or inadvertently…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Jingrui Hou , Axel Finke , Georgina Cosma

Graph neural networks (GNN) have recently emerged as a vehicle for applying deep network architectures to graph and relational data. However, given the increasing size of industrial datasets, in many practical situations the message passing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Qingru Zhang , David Wipf , Quan Gan , Le Song

Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Yiling Jia , Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu , Hongning Wang

We study the tradeoff between computational effort and classification accuracy in a cascade of deep neural networks. During inference, the user sets the acceptable accuracy degradation which then automatically determines confidence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Konstantin Berestizshevsky , Guy Even

We propose new, more efficient targeted white-box attacks against deep neural networks. Our attacks better align with the attacker's goal: (1) tricking a model to assign higher probability to the target class than to any other class, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Weiran Lin , Keane Lucas , Lujo Bauer , Michael K. Reiter , Mahmood Sharif

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Reinforcement learning agents need exploratory behaviors to escape from local optima. These behaviors may include both immediate dithering perturbation and temporally consistent exploration. To achieve these, a stochastic policy model that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Sirui Xie , Junning Huang , Lanxin Lei , Chunxiao Liu , Zheng Ma , Wei Zhang , Liang Lin

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›