Related papers: Policy Gradient with Tree Expansion
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…
Regression trees have emerged as a preeminent tool for solving real-world regression problems due to their ability to deal with nonlinearities, interaction effects and sharp discontinuities. In this article, we rather study regression trees…
Direct policy optimization in reinforcement learning is usually solved with policy-gradient algorithms, which optimize policy parameters via stochastic gradient ascent. This paper provides a new theoretical interpretation and justification…
Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…
This note introduces Isometric Policy Optimization (ISOPO), an efficient method to approximate the natural policy gradient in a single gradient step. In comparison, existing proximal policy methods such as GRPO or CISPO use multiple…
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…
In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…
We propose an optimization proxy in terms of iterative implicit gradient methods for solving constrained optimization problems with nonconvex loss functions. This framework can be applied to a broad range of machine learning settings,…
Training a classifier over a large number of classes, known as 'extreme classification', has become a topic of major interest with applications in technology, science, and e-commerce. Traditional softmax regression induces a gradient cost…
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…
Managing risk in dynamic decision problems is of cardinal importance in many fields such as finance and process control. The most common approach to defining risk is through various variance related criteria such as the Sharpe Ratio or the…
In many applications of supervised learning, multiple classification or regression outputs have to be predicted jointly. We consider several extensions of gradient boosting to address such problems. We first propose a straightforward…
Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) is a very successful ensemble learning algorithm widely used across a variety of applications. Recently, several variants of GBDT training algorithms and implementations have been designed and heavily…
We study the problem of policy optimization for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes with softmax policy and nonlinear function approximation trained with policy gradient algorithms. We concentrate on the training dynamics…
We propose a soft gradient boosting framework for sequential regression that embeds a learnable linear feature transform within the boosting procedure. At each boosting iteration, we train a soft decision tree and learn a linear input…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems,…
Estimating optimal dynamic policies from offline data is a fundamental problem in dynamic decision making. In the context of causal inference, the problem is known as estimating the optimal dynamic treatment regime. Even though there exists…
Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…
Policy gradient methods are a vital ingredient behind the success of modern reinforcement learning. Modern policy gradient methods, although successful, introduce a residual error in gradient estimation. In this work, we argue that this…
In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…