Related papers: Enabling surrogate-assisted evolutionary reinforce…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have made huge progress in recent years by leveraging the power of deep neural networks (DNN). Despite the success, deep RL algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, often requiring many rounds of…

Traditionally, Deep Artificial Neural Networks (DNN's) are trained through gradient descent. Recent research shows that Deep Neuroevolution (DNE) is also capable of evolving multi-million-parameter DNN's, which proved to be particularly…

Deep neuroevolution and deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) algorithms are two popular approaches to policy search. The former is widely applicable and rather stable, but suffers from low sample efficiency. By contrast, the latter is more…

Expensive optimization problems (EOPs) are prevalent in real-world applications, where the evaluation of a single solution requires a significant amount of resources. In our study of surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) in…

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved significant breakthroughs in various tasks. However, most DRL algorithms suffer a problem of generalizing the learned policy which makes the learning performance largely affected even by minor…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is an essential stage of modern AI deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the dominant fine-tuning paradigm, underpinning many state-of-the-art LLMs. In contrast,…

We propose Ephemeral Value Adjusments (EVA): a means of allowing deep reinforcement learning agents to rapidly adapt to experience in their replay buffer. EVA shifts the value predicted by a neural network with an estimate of the value…

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been successfully applied to optimize the policies for Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks due to their exploration ability. The recently proposed Negatively Correlated Search (NCS) provides a distinct…

Many evolutionary algorithms (EAs) take advantage of parallel evaluation of candidates. However, if evaluation times vary significantly, many worker nodes (i.e.,\ compute clients) are idle much of the time, waiting for the next generation…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Expensive optimization problems (EOPs) are black-box tasks with costly objective evaluations and no gradient access, making the evaluation budget the key bottleneck. Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) reduce evaluations via…

A key challenge in e-learning environments like Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) is to induce effective pedagogical policies efficiently. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) often suffers from sample inefficiency and reward function…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated significant potential in certain real-world industrial applications, yet its broader deployment remains limited by inherent challenges such as sample inefficiency and unstable learning dynamics.…

Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (EvoRL) has emerged as a promising approach to overcoming the limitations of traditional reinforcement learning (RL) by integrating the Evolutionary Computation (EC) paradigm with RL. However, the…

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to learn effective policies for complex tasks, such as Atari games, even from image observations. However, this typically requires very large amounts of interaction -- substantially more,…

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents can successfully learn to handle complex tasks, effectively generalizing acquired skills to unfamiliar settings remains a challenge. One of the reasons behind this is the visual encoders used are…

Reinforcement learning (RL) studies how an agent comes to achieve reward in an environment through interactions over time. Recent advances in machine RL have surpassed human expertise at the world's oldest board games and many classic video…

In NeuroEvolution, the topologies of artificial neural networks are optimized with evolutionary algorithms to solve tasks in data regression, data classification, or reinforcement learning. One downside of NeuroEvolution is the large amount…

Empowered by deep neural networks, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical successes in various domains, including games, health care, and autonomous driving. Despite these advancements, DRL is still…