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Combinatorial optimization has found applications in numerous fields, from aerospace to transportation planning and economics. The goal is to find an optimal solution among a finite set of possibilities. The well-known challenge one faces…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its ability to solve high dimensional tasks by leveraging non-linear function approximators. However, these successes are mostly achieved by 'black-box' policies in simulated domains. When…
Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…
This paper gives a detailed review of reinforcement learning (RL) in combinatorial optimization, introduces the history of combinatorial optimization starting in the 1950s, and compares it with the RL algorithms of recent years. This paper…
We present a simple, sample-efficient algorithm for introducing large but directed learning steps in reinforcement learning (RL), through the use of evolutionary operators. The methodology uses a population of RL agents training with a…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been used to learn effective heuristics for solving complex combinatorial optimisation problem via policy networks and have demonstrated promising performance. Existing works have focused on solving…
Learning in strategy games (e.g. StarCraft, poker) requires the discovery of diverse policies. This is often achieved by iteratively training new policies against existing ones, growing a policy population that is robust to exploit. This…
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…
Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…
Current methods for end-to-end constructive neural combinatorial optimization usually train a policy using behavior cloning from expert solutions or policy gradient methods from reinforcement learning. While behavior cloning is…
Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has mostly focused on learning policies, typically neural networks, that operate on a single candidate solution at a time, either by constructing one from scratch or iteratively improving it. In…
In many real-world applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents might have to solve multiple tasks, each one typically modeled via a reward function. If reward functions are expressed linearly, and the agent has previously learned a set…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) traditionally relies on scalar reward signals, limiting its ability to leverage the rich semantic knowledge often available in real-world tasks. In contrast, humans learn efficiently by combining numerical…
This paper presents a framework to tackle constrained combinatorial optimization problems using deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, we extend the Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) theory in order to deal with constraints in…
Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) frameworks have shown potential for solving NP-hard routing problems such as the traveling salesman problem (TSP) without problem-specific expert knowledge. Although DRL can be used to solve…
The problem of how to take the right actions to make profits in sequential process continues to be difficult due to the quick dynamics and a significant amount of uncertainty in many application scenarios. In such complicated environments,…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven a stunning ability to learn optimal policies from data without any prior knowledge on the process. The main drawback of RL is that it is typically very difficult to guarantee stability and safety. On…
Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) excels in various domains but lacks generalizability and interpretability. On the other hand, programmatic RL methods (Trivedi et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2023) reformulate RL tasks as synthesizing…
Humans and animals solve a difficult problem much more easily when they are presented with a sequence of problems that starts simple and slowly increases in difficulty. We explore this idea in the context of reinforcement learning. Rather…
In this paper, we propose cautious policy programming (CPP), a novel value-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that can ensure monotonic policy improvement during learning. Based on the nature of entropy-regularized RL, we derive a…