Related papers: Consensus Based Stochastic Control
Zero-order optimization has recently received significant attention for designing optimal trajectories and policies for robotic systems. However, most existing methods (e.g., MPPI, CEM, and CMA-ES) are local in nature, as they rely on…
Many real world stochastic control problems suffer from the "curse of dimensionality". To overcome this difficulty, we develop a deep learning approach that directly solves high-dimensional stochastic control problems based on Monte-Carlo…
This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…
We adapt the ideas underlying the success of Deep Q-Learning to the continuous action domain. We present an actor-critic, model-free algorithm based on the deterministic policy gradient that can operate over continuous action spaces. Using…
Consensus-based optimization (CBO) is a multi-agent metaheuristic derivative-free optimization algorithm that has proven to be capable of globally minimizing nonconvex nonsmooth functions across a diverse range of applications while being…
Stochastic model predictive control has been a successful and robust control framework for many robotics tasks where the system dynamics model is slightly inaccurate or in the presence of environment disturbances. Despite the successes, it…
Many engineering problems have multiple objectives, and the overall aim is to optimize a non-linear function of these objectives. In this paper, we formulate the problem of maximizing a non-linear concave function of multiple long-term…
Model-based reinforcement learning approaches carry the promise of being data efficient. However, due to challenges in learning dynamics models that sufficiently match the real-world dynamics, they struggle to achieve the same asymptotic…
We analyze a zeroth-order particle algorithm for the global optimization of a non-convex function, focusing on a variant of Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO) with small but fixed noise intensity. Unlike most previous studies restricted to…
Consensus-based optimization (CBO) has established itself as an efficient gradient-free optimization scheme, with attractive mathematical properties, such as mean-field convergence results for non-convex loss functions. In this work, we…
Interest in derivative-free optimization (DFO) and "evolutionary strategies" (ES) has recently surged in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) community, with growing evidence that they can match state of the art methods for policy optimization…
Actor-critic methods, like Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3), depend on basic noise-based exploration, which can result in less than optimal policy convergence. In this study, we introduce Monte Carlo Beam Search (MCBS),…
In this paper, we present the Monte-Carlo Compressive Optimization algorithm, a new method to solve a combinatorial optimization problem that is assumed compressible. The method relies on random queries to the objective function in order to…
We propose a multi-swarm approach to approximate the Pareto front of general multi-objective optimization problems that is based on the Consensus-based Optimization method (CBO). The algorithm is motivated step by step beginning with a…
We propose a comprehensive framework for policy gradient methods tailored to continuous time reinforcement learning. This is based on the connection between stochastic control problems and randomised problems, enabling applications across…
In this paper, we propose several approaches to learn the optimal population-dependent controls in order to solve mean field control problems (MFC). Such policies enable us to solve MFC problems with forms of common noises at a level of…
Reinforcement learning constantly deals with hard integrals, for example when computing expectations in policy evaluation and policy iteration. These integrals are rarely analytically solvable and typically estimated with the Monte Carlo…
Stochastic optimization in learning and inference often relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to approximate gradients when exact computation is intractable. However, finite-time MCMC estimators are biased, and reducing this bias…
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…
Consensus-based optimization (CBO) is a class of metaheuristic algorithms designed for global optimization problems. In the many-particle limit, classical CBO dynamics can be rigorously connected to mean-field equations that ensure…