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Related papers: SoftTreeMax: Policy Gradient with Tree Search

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We develop a method for policy architecture search and adaptation via gradient-free optimization which can learn to perform autonomous driving tasks. By learning from both demonstration and environmental reward we develop a model that can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-18 Sayna Ebrahimi , Anna Rohrbach , Trevor Darrell

We develop and implement a version of the popular "policytree" method (Athey and Wager, 2021) using discrete optimisation techniques. We test the performance of our algorithm in finite samples and find an improvement in the runtime of…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-06-19 James Cussens , Julia Hatamyar , Vishalie Shah , Noemi Kreif

There are many approaches for training decision trees. This work introduces a novel gradient-based method for constructing decision trees that optimize arbitrary differentiable loss functions, overcoming the limitations of heuristic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Andrei V. Konstantinov , Lev V. Utkin

A common paradigm in classical planning is heuristic forward search. Forward search planners often rely on simple best-first search which remains fixed throughout the search process. In this paper, we introduce a novel search framework…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-12 Pawel Gomoluch , Dalal Alrajeh , Alessandra Russo

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms perform simulation-based search to improve policies online. During search, the simulation policy is adapted to explore the most promising lines of play. MCTS has been used by state-of-the-art…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Thomas Anthony , Robert Nishihara , Philipp Moritz , Tim Salimans , John Schulman

Decision trees are ubiquitous in machine learning for their ease of use and interpretability. Yet, these models are not typically employed in reinforcement learning as they cannot be updated online via stochastic gradient descent. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Andrew Silva , Taylor Killian , Ivan Dario Jimenez Rodriguez , Sung-Hyun Son , Matthew Gombolay

Decision tree learning is a widely used approach in machine learning, favoured in applications that require concise and interpretable models. Heuristic methods are traditionally used to quickly produce models with reasonably high accuracy.…

In reinforcement learning, the softmax parametrization is the standard approach for policies over discrete action spaces. However, it fails to capture the order relationship between actions. Motivated by a real-world industrial problem, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Simón Weinberger , Jairo Cugliari

Finite-horizon lookahead policies are abundantly used in Reinforcement Learning and demonstrate impressive empirical success. Usually, the lookahead policies are implemented with specific planning methods such as Monte Carlo Tree Search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Yonathan Efroni , Gal Dalal , Bruno Scherrer , Shie Mannor

Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Thomas Spooner , Nelson Vadori , Sumitra Ganesh

We present a scalable tree search planning algorithm for large multi-agent sequential decision problems that require dynamic collaboration. Teams of agents need to coordinate decisions in many domains, but naive approaches fail due to the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-14 Shushman Choudhury , Jayesh K. Gupta , Peter Morales , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Long-horizon planning in realistic environments requires the ability to reason over sequential tasks in high-dimensional state spaces with complex dynamics. Classical motion planning algorithms, such as rapidly-exploring random trees, are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-10-14 Brian Ichter , Pierre Sermanet , Corey Lynch

Tree search algorithms, such as branch-and-bound, are the most widely used tools for solving combinatorial and nonconvex problems. For example, they are the foremost method for solving (mixed) integer programs and constraint satisfaction…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-18 Maria-Florina Balcan , Travis Dick , Tuomas Sandholm , Ellen Vitercik

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zhenshuo Zhang , Minxuan Duan , Youran Ye , Hongyang R. Zhang

Scaling reinforcement learning to tens of thousands of parallel environments requires overcoming the limited exploration capacity of a single policy. Ensemble-based policy gradient methods, which employ multiple policies to collect diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Naoki Shitanda , Motoki Omura , Tatsuya Harada , Takayuki Osa

Standard reinforcement learning methods aim to master one way of solving a task whereas there may exist multiple near-optimal policies. Being able to identify this collection of near-optimal policies can allow a domain expert to efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Muhammad A. Masood , Finale Doshi-Velez

We make three contributions toward better understanding policy gradient methods in the tabular setting. First, we show that with the true gradient, policy gradient with a softmax parametrization converges at a $O(1/t)$ rate, with constants…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Jincheng Mei , Chenjun Xiao , Csaba Szepesvari , Dale Schuurmans

We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Michael Lu , Matin Aghaei , Anant Raj , Sharan Vaswani

Random forests are an ensemble method relevant for many problems, such as regression or classification. They are popular due to their good predictive performance (compared to, e.g., decision trees) requiring only minimal tuning of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-20 Nikolaus Umlauf , Nadja Klein