Related papers: Policy Gradient with Tree Expansion
Policy gradient algorithms have been widely applied to Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning problems in recent years. Regularization with various entropy functions is often used to encourage exploration and improve…
For continuing environments, reinforcement learning (RL) methods commonly maximize the discounted reward criterion with discount factor close to 1 in order to approximate the average reward (the gain). However, such a criterion only…
We propose a hybrid algorithmic strategy for complex stochastic optimization problems, which combines the use of scenario trees from multistage stochastic programming with machine learning techniques for learning a policy in the form of a…
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…
Distributed training and increasing the gradient update frequency are practical strategies to accelerate learning and improve performance, but both exacerbate a central challenge: \textit{policy lag}, which is the mismatch between the…
We provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of gradient clipping in training deep neural networks. The key ingredient is a new smoothness condition derived from practical neural network training examples. We observe that…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods are among the most widely used policy optimization algorithms in contemporary reinforcement learning. This class of methods is often applied in conjunction with entropy regularization -- an algorithmic…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…
There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…
Gradient-based methods are often used for policy optimization in deep reinforcement learning, despite being vulnerable to local optima and saddle points. Although gradient-free methods (e.g., genetic algorithms or evolution strategies) help…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
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…
Differentiable simulation is a promising toolkit for fast gradient-based policy optimization and system identification. However, existing approaches to differentiable simulation have largely tackled scenarios where obtaining smooth…
Boosted decision trees enjoy popularity in a variety of applications; however, for large-scale datasets, the cost of training a decision tree in each round can be prohibitively expensive. Inspired by ideas from the multi-arm bandit…
Bilevel Optimization Programming is used to model complex and conflicting interactions between agents, for example in Robust AI or Privacy-preserving AI. Integrating bilevel mathematical programming within deep learning is thus an essential…
Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is…
Tabular data is prevalent in many high-stakes domains, such as financial services or public policy. Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) are popular in these settings due to their scalability, performance, and low training cost. While…
Full-parameter fine-tuning of large language models is constrained by substantial GPU memory requirements. Low-rank adaptation methods mitigate this challenge by updating only a subset of parameters. However, these approaches often limit…
Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for…
Current methods for the interpretability of discriminative deep neural networks commonly rely on the model's input-gradients, i.e., the gradients of the output logits w.r.t. the inputs. The common assumption is that these input-gradients…