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We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-29 John Schulman , Filip Wolski , Prafulla Dhariwal , Alec Radford , Oleg Klimov

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Sarah Müller , Alexander von Rohr , Sebastian Trimpe

Expert Iteration (ExIt) is an effective framework for learning game-playing policies from self-play. ExIt involves training a policy to mimic the search behaviour of a tree search algorithm - such as Monte-Carlo tree search - and using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Dennis J. N. J. Soemers , Éric Piette , Matthew Stephenson , Cameron Browne

This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

Federated learning has emerged as a promising distributed learning paradigm that facilitates collaborative learning among multiple parties without transferring raw data. However, most existing federated learning studies focus on either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Qinbin Li , Chulin Xie , Xiaojun Xu , Xiaoyuan Liu , Ce Zhang , Bo Li , Bingsheng He , Dawn Song

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have significantly enhanced the agentic capabilities of large language models (LLMs). In long-term and multi-turn agent tasks, existing approaches driven solely by outcome rewards often suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Yuxiang Ji , Ziyu Ma , Yong Wang , Guanhua Chen , Xiangxiang Chu , Liaoni Wu

Decision trees provide a rich family of highly non-linear but efficient models, due to which they continue to be the go-to family of predictive models by practitioners across domains. But learning trees is challenging due to their discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Ajaykrishna Karthikeyan , Naman Jain , Nagarajan Natarajan , Prateek Jain

Robust Policy Search is the problem of learning policies that do not degrade in performance when subject to unseen environment model parameters. It is particularly relevant for transferring policies learned in a simulation environment to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Sai Kiran Narayanaswami , Nandan Sudarsanam , Balaraman Ravindran

Robots have become increasingly prevalent in dynamic and crowded environments such as airports and shopping malls. In these scenarios, the critical challenges for robot navigation are reliability and timely arrival at predetermined…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-21 Zhirui Sun , Boshu Lei , Peijia Xie , Fugang Liu , Junjie Gao , Ying Zhang , Jiankun Wang

We introduce a learning method called ``gradient-based reinforcement planning'' (GREP). Unlike traditional DP methods that improve their policy backwards in time, GREP is a gradient-based method that plans ahead and improves its policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Ivo Kwee , Marcus Hutter , Juergen Schmidhuber

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

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into closed-loop robotic task planning has become increasingly popular within embodied artificial intelligence. Previous efforts mainly focused on leveraging the strong reasoning abilities of LLMs to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Chaoyuan Zhang , Zhaowei Li , Wentao Yuan

Recent advances in reasoning with large language models (LLMs) have shown the effectiveness of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for generating high quality intermediate trajectories, particularly in math and symbolic domains. Inspired by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Bingning Huang , Tu Nguyen , Matthieu Zimmer

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

In recent years, significant progress has been made on algorithms for learning optimal decision trees, primarily in the context of binary features. Extending these methods to continuous features remains substantially more challenging due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Harold Kiossou , Pierre Schaus , Siegfried Nijssen

Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Yisong Yue , Animashree Anandkumar

Policy-gradient approaches to reinforcement learning have two common and undesirable overhead procedures, namely warm-start training and sample variance reduction. In this paper, we describe a reinforcement learning method based on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-17 Nan Ding , Radu Soricut

Bayesian Additive Regression Trees [BART, Chipman et al., 2010] have gained significant popularity due to their remarkable predictive performance and ability to quantify uncertainty. However, standard decision tree models rely on recursive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-20 Stamatina Lamprinakou , Huiyan Sang , Bledar A. Konomi , Ligang Lu

We study optimal decision policies for integer linear programs with a fixed feasible set and varying cost vectors, represented as linear decision trees. Once synthesized for a given feasible set, they return an optimal solution for any…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-05 Théo Guyard , Cleber Oliveira , Maximilian Schiffer , Eduardo Uchoa , Thibaut Vidal

Distribution-based search algorithms are an effective approach for evolutionary reinforcement learning of neural network controllers. In these algorithms, gradients of the total reward with respect to the policy parameters are estimated…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Nihat Engin Toklu , Paweł Liskowski , Rupesh Kumar Srivastava