Related papers: Consensus Based Stochastic Control
Policy gradient methods have enjoyed great success in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimates. The high variance problem is particularly exasperated in problems with long horizons or high-dimensional…
In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several…
The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…
We propose an adaptive optimisation approach for tuning stochastic model predictive control (MPC) hyper-parameters while jointly estimating probability distributions of the transition model parameters based on performance rewards. In…
Constrained reinforcement learning has achieved promising progress in safety-critical fields where both rewards and constraints are considered. However, constrained reinforcement learning methods face challenges in striking the right…
Monte Carlo Exploring Starts (MCES), which aims to learn the optimal policy using only sample returns, is a simple and natural algorithm in reinforcement learning which has been shown to converge under various conditions. However, the…
Maneuver decision-making can be regarded as a Markov decision process and can be address by reinforcement learning. However, original reinforcement learning algorithms can hardly solve the maneuvering decision-making problem. One reason is…
Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…
Machine learning problems with multiple objective functions appear either in learning with multiple criteria where learning has to make a trade-off between multiple performance metrics such as fairness, safety and accuracy; or, in…
In this paper, we present a Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) algorithm named \emph{Monte Carlo Probabilistic Inference for Learning COntrol} (MC-PILCO). The algorithm relies on Gaussian Processes (GPs) to model the system dynamics…
Min-max optimization is emerging as a key framework for analyzing problems of robustness to strategically and adversarially generated data. We propose a random reshuffling-based gradient free Optimistic Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithm for…
Constraint handling plays a key role in solving realistic complex optimization problems. Though intensively discussed in the last few decades, existing constraint handling techniques predominantly rely on human experts' designs, which more…
In this paper, we study the conditional stochastic optimization (CSO) problem which covers a variety of applications including portfolio selection, reinforcement learning, robust learning, causal inference, etc. The sample-averaged gradient…
The training of modern machine learning models often consists in solving high-dimensional non-convex optimisation problems that are subject to large-scale data. In this context, momentum-based stochastic optimisation algorithms have become…
Distributed stochastic optimization algorithms can simultaneously process large-scale datasets, significantly accelerating model training. However, their effectiveness is often hindered by the sparsity of distributed networks and data…
We study the finite-agent behavior of Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO), a recent metaheuristic for the global minimization of a function, that combines drift toward a consensus estimate with stochastic exploration. While previous analyses…
In this work we extend the class of Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO) metaheuristic methods by considering memory effects and a random selection strategy. The proposed algorithm iteratively updates a population of particles according to a…
Continuous-time Markov decision processes are an important class of models in a wide range of applications, ranging from cyber-physical systems to synthetic biology. A central problem is how to devise a policy to control the system in order…
We systematically review the Variational Optimization, Variational Inference and Stochastic Search perspectives on sampling-based dynamic optimization and discuss their connections to state-of-the-art optimizers and Stochastic Optimal…
Least squares Monte Carlo methods are a popular numerical approximation method for solving stochastic control problems. Based on dynamic programming, their key feature is the approximation of the conditional expectation of future rewards by…