Related papers: Hard-Thresholding Meets Evolution Strategies in Re…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
Nonlinear equations systems (NESs) are widely used in real-world problems while they are also difficult to solve due to their characteristics of nonlinearity and multiple roots. Evolutionary algorithm (EA) is one of the methods for solving…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Evolution Strategies (ESs) have surpassed human-level control in many sequential decision-making problems, yet many open challenges still exist. To get insights into the strengths and weaknesses of DRL…
Dealing with sparse rewards is a long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) addresses this problem by reusing failed trajectories for one goal as successful trajectories for another. This…
Zeroth-order local optimisation algorithms are essential for solving real-valued black-box optimisation problems. Among these, Natural Evolution Strategies (NES) represent a prominent class, particularly well-suited for scenarios where…
Natural evolutionary strategies (NES) are a family of gradient-free black-box optimization algorithms. This study illustrates their use for the optimization of randomly-initialized parametrized quantum circuits (PQCs) in the region of…
This work explores learning agent-agnostic synthetic environments (SEs) for Reinforcement Learning. SEs act as a proxy for target environments and allow agents to be trained more efficiently than when directly trained on the target…
Studies have shown evolution strategies (ES) to be a promising approach for reinforcement learning (RL) with deep neural networks. However, the issue of high sample complexity persists in applications of ES to deep RL over long horizons.…
In this work, we propose a new variant of natural evolution strategies (NES) for high-dimensional black-box optimization problems. The proposed method, CR-FM-NES, extends a recently proposed state-of-the-art NES, Fast Moving Natural…
Efficient learning in the environment with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). In continuous DRL environments such as robotic arms control, Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) has been…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for addressing complex control problems, particularly those involving underactuated robotic systems. However, in some cases, policies may require refinement to achieve…
We present a novel Natural Evolution Strategy (NES) variant, the Rank-One NES (R1-NES), which uses a low rank approximation of the search distribution covariance matrix. The algorithm allows computation of the natural gradient with cost…
Evolutionary Strategies (ES) are a popular family of black-box zeroth-order optimization algorithms which rely on search distributions to efficiently optimize a large variety of objective functions. This paper investigates the potential…
Weight-perturbation evolution strategies (ES) can fine-tune billion-parameter language models with surprisingly small populations (e.g., $N\!\approx\!30$), contradicting classical zeroth-order curse-of-dimensionality intuition. We also…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from three core difficulties: temporal credit assignment with sparse rewards, lack…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to solve the problem of finding obstacle-free paths for autonomous agents operating in stochastic and uncertain environments. However, when the underlying stochastic dynamics of the…
Deep artificial neural networks (DNNs) are typically trained via gradient-based learning algorithms, namely backpropagation. Evolution strategies (ES) can rival backprop-based algorithms such as Q-learning and policy gradients on…
Advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have demonstrated data efficiency and optimal control over large state spaces at the cost of scalable performance. Genetic methods, on the other hand, provide scalability but depict hyperparameter…
Training strategies for modern deep neural networks (NNs) tend to induce a heavy-tailed (HT) empirical spectral density (ESD) in the layer weights. While previous efforts have shown that the HT phenomenon correlates with good generalization…
Although deep reinforcement learning methods can learn effective policies for challenging problems such as Atari games and robotics tasks, algorithms are complex, and training times are often long. This study investigates how Evolution…