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Related papers: Policy Gradient with Kernel Quadrature

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This paper considers policy search in continuous state-action reinforcement learning problems. Typically, one computes search directions using a classic expression for the policy gradient called the Policy Gradient Theorem, which decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-13 Sujay Bhatt , Alec Koppel , Vikram Krishnamurthy

One of the most significant bottleneck in training large scale machine learning models on parameter server (PS) is the communication overhead, because it needs to frequently exchange the model gradients between the workers and servers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-25 Guoxin Cui , Jun Xu , Wei Zeng , Yanyan Lan , Jiafeng Guo , Xueqi Cheng

Behavioural metrics have been shown to be an effective mechanism for constructing representations in reinforcement learning. We present a novel perspective on behavioural metrics for Markov decision processes via the use of positive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Pablo Samuel Castro , Tyler Kastner , Prakash Panangaden , Mark Rowland

This paper studies a distributed policy gradient in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents over a communication network aim to find the optimal policy to maximize the average of all agents' local returns. Due…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Xiaoxiao Zhao , Jinlong Lei , Li Li , Jie Chen

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Arushi Jain , Gandharv Patil , Ayush Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

Aligning large language models with pointwise absolute rewards has so far required online, on-policy algorithms such as PPO and GRPO. In contrast, simpler methods that can leverage offline or off-policy data, such as DPO and REBEL, are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Simon Matrenok , Skander Moalla , Caglar Gulcehre

Sequence-to-sequence architectures built upon recurrent neural networks have become a standard choice for multi-step-ahead time series prediction. In these models, the decoder produces future values conditioned on contextual inputs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Qi Sima , Xinze Zhang , Yukun Bao , Siyue Yang , Liang Shen

We present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-18 Vikram Krishnamurthy , Felisa Vazquez Abad

Policy gradient methods are a powerful family of reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control that optimize a policy directly. However, standard first-order methods often converge slowly. Second-order methods can accelerate…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-05 Amirreza Valaei , Arash Bahari Kordabad , Sadegh Soudjani

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning algorithms have shown great potential and success for solving many challenging real-world problems, including Go game and robotic applications. Usually, these algorithms need a carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Yang Liu , Yunan Luo , Yuanyi Zhong , Xi Chen , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Mattis Manfred Kämmerer

Policy gradient algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning and belong to the class of approximate dynamic programming methods. This paper studies two key policy gradient algorithms, the Natural Policy Gradient and the Gauss-Newton…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-11 Bowen Song , Sebastien Gros , Andrea Iannelli

We propose a method for designing policies for convex stochastic control problems characterized by random linear dynamics and convex stage cost. We consider policies that employ quadratic approximate value functions as a substitute for the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-10 Alan Yang , Stephen Boyd

Gradient descent method, as one of the major methods in numerical optimization, is the key ingredient in many machine learning algorithms. As one of the most fundamental way to solve the optimization problems, it promises the function value…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-02-01 Keren Li , Shijie Wei , Feihao Zhang , Pan Gao , Zengrong Zhou , Tao Xin , Xiaoting Wang , Guilu Long

While bigger and deeper neural network architectures continue to advance the state-of-the-art for many computer vision tasks, real-world adoption of these networks is impeded by hardware and speed constraints. Conventional model compression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-19 Anubhav Ashok , Nicholas Rhinehart , Fares Beainy , Kris M. Kitani

There is a growing desire in the field of reinforcement learning (and machine learning in general) to move from black-box models toward more "interpretable AI." We improve interpretability of reinforcement learning by increasing the utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Aaron M. Roth , Nicholay Topin , Pooyan Jamshidi , Manuela Veloso

Reinforcement learning for the optimization of quantum circuits uses an agent whose goal is to maximize the value of a reward function that decides what is correct and what is wrong during the exploration of the search space. It is an open…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-11-22 Ioana Moflic , Alexandru Paler

Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan

In this article, we introduce a kernel-based consensual aggregation method for regression problems. We aim to exibly combine individual regression estimators $r_1, \ldots, r_M$ using a weighted average where the weights are dened based on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-10-03 Sothea Has