Related papers: Improving Sample Efficiency in Evolutionary RL Usi…
We explore the use of Evolution Strategies (ES), a class of black box optimization algorithms, as an alternative to popular MDP-based RL techniques such as Q-learning and Policy Gradients. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari show that ES is a…
Evolution Strategies (ES) emerged as a scalable alternative to popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques, providing an almost perfect speedup when distributed across hundreds of CPU cores thanks to a reduced communication overhead.…
Evolution Strategies (ES) have recently been demonstrated to be a viable alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms on a set of challenging deep RL problems, including Atari games and MuJoCo humanoid locomotion benchmarks. While…
Evolution Strategies (ES) are a powerful class of blackbox optimization techniques that recently became a competitive alternative to state-of-the-art policy gradient (PG) algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL). We propose a new method…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…
Probabilistic learning to rank (LTR) has been the dominating approach for optimizing the ranking metric, but cannot maximize long-term rewards. Reinforcement learning models have been proposed to maximize user long-term rewards by…
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are widely used for their strong asymptotic performance and training stability, but they struggle to scale with larger batch sizes, as additional parallel environments yield redundant data…
In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning method in a reinforcement learning setting, based on evolution strategies (ES), exploration in parameter space and deterministic policy gradients. ES methods are easy to parallelize, which is…
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are typically characterized as algorithms that perform policy updates using i.i.d. trajectories collected by the agent's current policy. However, after observing only a finite number of…
We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…
Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…
Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of black-box optimization algorithms able to train deep neural networks roughly as well as Q-learning and policy gradient methods on challenging deep reinforcement learning (RL) problems, but are much…
Policy gradient reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved impressive performance in challenging learning tasks such as continuous control, but suffer from high sample complexity. Experience replay is a commonly used approach to…
In this paper, we try to improve exploration in Blackbox methods, particularly Evolution strategies (ES), when applied to Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems where intermediate waypoints/subgoals are available. Since Evolutionary…
Evolution strategies (ES), as a family of black-box optimization algorithms, recently emerge as a scalable alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) approaches such as Q-learning or policy gradient, and are much faster when many central…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for deploying RL agents in real-world applications, as it aims to maximize long-term rewards while satisfying safety constraints. However, safe RL often suffers from sample inefficiency, requiring…
Evolution strategy (ES) has been shown great promise in many challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, rivaling other state-of-the-art deep RL methods. Yet, there are two limitations in the current ES practice that may hinder its…
Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy by interaction with an environment. Consequently, learning complex behavior requires a vast number of samples, which can be prohibitive in practice. Nevertheless, instead of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…
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…