Related papers: PI-ARS: Accelerating Evolution-Learned Visual-Loco…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising solution to enable evolutionary automated driving. However, the conventional RL method is always concerned with risk performance. The updated policy may not obtain a performance enhancement,…

We introduce a new shrinkage variable selection operator for linear models which we term the \emph{adaptive ridge selector} (ARiS). This approach is inspired by the \emph{relevance vector machine} (RVM), which uses a Bayesian hierarchical…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often rely on fixed top-k document selection mechanisms that ignore downstream generation quality and impose computational overheads. We propose SRAS (Sparse Reward-Aware Selector), a lightweight…

Subset selection from massive data with noised information is increasingly popular for various applications. This problem is still highly challenging as current methods are generally slow in speed and sensitive to outliers. To address the…

We introduce Air Learning, an open-source simulator, and a gym environment for deep reinforcement learning research on resource-constrained aerial robots. Equipped with domain randomization, Air Learning exposes a UAV agent to a diverse set…

Researchers have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in sequential decision making problems (e.g., robotics control, sequential prediction) with deep neural network models. One often has access to near-optimal oracles that achieve…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to solve the problem of finding obstacle-free paths for autonomous agents operating in stochastic and uncertain environments. However, when the underlying stochastic dynamics of the…

Speculative Decoding is a prominent technique for accelerating the autoregressive inference of large language models (LLMs) by employing a fast draft model to propose candidate token sequences and a large target model to verify them in…

The fusion of the multi-agent paradigm with evolutionary computation yielded promising results in many optimization problems. Evolutionary multi-agent system (EMAS) are more similar to biological evolution than classical evolutionary…

Quadruped robots face limitations in long-range navigation efficiency due to their reliance on legs. To ameliorate the limitations, we introduce a Reinforcement Learning-based Active Transporter Riding method (\textit{RL-ATR}), inspired by…

In this paper we analyze the qualitative differences between evolutionary strategies and reinforcement learning algorithms by focusing on two popular state-of-the-art algorithms: the OpenAI-ES evolutionary strategy and the Proximal Policy…

Evolution Strategies (ES) has recently emerged as a competitive alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, offering advantages through simplicity, scalability, and inference-only training.…

Pre-trained vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a promising foundation for generalist robot policies, but often produce brittle behaviors or unsafe failures when deployed zero-shot in out-of-distribution scenarios. We present…

Advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have demonstrated data efficiency and optimal control over large state spaces at the cost of scalable performance. Genetic methods, on the other hand, provide scalability but depict hyperparameter…

We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…

In this paper, we experiment with novelty-based variants of OpenAI-ES, the NS-ES and NSR-ES algorithms, and evaluate their effectiveness in training complex, transformer-based architectures designed for the problem of reinforcement…

The most data-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) in robotics are based on uncertain dynamical models: after each episode, they first learn a dynamical model of the robot, then they use an optimization algorithm to find a…

We are motivated by the real challenges presented in a human-robot system to develop new designs that are efficient at data level and with performance guarantees such as stability and optimality at systems level. Existing…

Electric Vehicles (EVs) offer substantial flexibility for grid services, yet large-scale, uncoordinated charging can threaten voltage stability in distribution networks. Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches for smart charging…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved impressive performance in many complex environments due to the integration with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). At the same time, Genetic Algorithms (GAs), often seen as a competing approach to RL, had…