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Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Multiple-step lookahead policies have demonstrated high empirical competence in Reinforcement Learning, via the use of Monte Carlo Tree Search or Model Predictive Control. In a recent work \cite{efroni2018beyond}, multiple-step greedy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-21 Yonathan Efroni , Gal Dalal , Bruno Scherrer , Shie Mannor

Policy gradient (PG) is a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that optimizes a parameterized policy model for an expected return using gradient ascent. While PG can work well even in non-Markovian environments, it may encounter plateaus or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Tetsuro Morimura , Kazuhiro Ota , Kenshi Abe , Peinan Zhang

This paper presents a constrained policy gradient algorithm. We introduce constraints for safe learning with the following steps. First, learning is slowed down (lazy learning) so that the episodic policy change can be computed with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-24 Balázs Varga , Balázs Kulcsár , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

Despite their remarkable capabilities, large language models often struggle with tasks requiring complex reasoning and planning. While existing approaches like Chain-of-Thought prompting and tree search techniques show promise, they are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Yang Li

We study the use of policy gradient algorithms to optimize over a class of generalized Thompson sampling policies. Our central insight is to view the posterior parameter sampled by Thompson sampling as a kind of pseudo-action. Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-01 Seungki Min , Ciamac C. Moallemi , Daniel J. Russo

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

Dynamic regression trees are an attractive option for automatic regression and classification with complicated response surfaces in on-line application settings. We create a sequential tree model whose state changes in time with the…

Methodology · Statistics 2010-11-23 Matthew A. Taddy , Robert B. Gramacy , Nicholas G. Polson

In recent years, state-of-the-art game-playing agents often involve policies that are trained in self-playing processes where Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithms and trained policies iteratively improve each other. The strongest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Dennis J. N. J. Soemers , Éric Piette , Matthew Stephenson , Cameron Browne

Decision trees and their ensembles are popular in machine learning as easy-to-understand models. Several techniques have been proposed in the literature for learning tree-based classifiers, with different techniques working well for data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Maria-Florina Balcan , Dravyansh Sharma

Although advancements in deep learning have significantly enhanced the recommendation accuracy of deep recommendation models, these methods still suffer from low recommendation efficiency. Recently proposed tree-based deep recommendation…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Ze Liu , Jin Zhang , Chao Feng , Defu Lian , Jie Wang , Enhong Chen

We present an algorithm for learning decision trees using stochastic gradient information as the source of supervision. In contrast to previous approaches to gradient-based tree learning, our method operates in the incremental learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-25 Henry Gouk , Bernhard Pfahringer , Eibe Frank

We revisit the finite time analysis of policy gradient methods in the one of the simplest settings: finite state and action MDPs with a policy class consisting of all stochastic policies and with exact gradient evaluations. There has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Jalaj Bhandari , Daniel Russo

Tree search has recently emerged as a powerful framework for aligning generative models with task-specific rewards at test time. Applying tree search to Masked Diffusion Language Models, however, introduces two key challenges: (i) parallel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zichao Yu , Ming Li , Wenyi Zhang , Weiguo Gao

This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Qianyi Chen , Ying Chen , Bo Li

Direct policy search (DPS) and look-ahead tree (LT) policies are two widely used classes of techniques to produce high performance policies for sequential decision-making problems. To make DPS approaches work well, one crucial issue is to…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Tobias Jung , Louis Wehenkel , Damien Ernst , Francis Maes

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

This paper considers policy search in continuous state-action reinforcement learning problems. Typically, one computes search directions using a classic expression for the policy gradient called the Policy Gradient Theorem, which decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-13 Sujay Bhatt , Alec Koppel , Vikram Krishnamurthy

We introduce a new class of tree-based models, P-Trees, for analyzing (unbalanced) panel of individual asset returns, generalizing high-dimensional sorting with economic guidance and interpretability. Under the mean-variance efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Lin William Cong , Guanhao Feng , Jingyu He , Xin He

We present a study of several generic tree search techniques applied to the Sequential Ordering Problem. This study enables us to propose a simple and competitive tree search algorithm. It consists of an iterative Beam Search algorithm that…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2020-01-26 Luc Libralesso , Abdel-Malik Bouhassoun , Hadrien Cambazard , Vincent Jost