Related papers: Unraveling the Rainbow: can value-based methods sc…
The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…
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…
Training a deep neural network to maximize a target objective has become the standard recipe for successful machine learning over the last decade. These networks can be optimized with supervised learning, if the target objective is…
Evolutionary algorithms, such as Differential Evolution, excel in solving real-parameter optimization challenges. However, the effectiveness of a single algorithm varies across different problem instances, necessitating considerable efforts…
The quintessential model-based reinforcement-learning agent iteratively refines its estimates or prior beliefs about the true underlying model of the environment. Recent empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning with…
A key challenge in solving a combinatorial optimization problem is how to guide the agent (i.e., solver) to efficiently explore the enormous search space. Conventional approaches often rely on enumeration (e.g., exhaustive, random, or tabu…
Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…
Assigning resources in business processes execution is a repetitive task that can be effectively automated. However, different automation methods may give varying results that may not be optimal. Proper resource allocation is crucial as it…
Job scheduling is a well-known Combinatorial Optimization problem with endless applications. Well planned schedules bring many benefits in the context of automated systems: among others, they limit production costs and waste. Nevertheless,…
Since the introduction of DQN, a vast majority of reinforcement learning research has focused on reinforcement learning with deep neural networks as function approximators. New methods are typically evaluated on a set of environments that…
Reinforcement learning algorithms such as the deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (DDPG) has been widely used in continuous control tasks. However, the model-free DDPG algorithm suffers from high sample complexity. In this paper we…
Reinforcement learning has recently gained traction as a means to improve combinatorial optimization methods, yet its effectiveness within local search metaheuristics specifically remains comparatively underexamined. In this study, we…
The design of good heuristics or approximation algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems often requires significant specialized knowledge and trial-and-error. Can we automate this challenging, tedious process, and learn the…
Branch-and-bound is a systematic enumerative method for combinatorial optimization, where the performance highly relies on the variable selection strategy. State-of-the-art handcrafted heuristic strategies suffer from relatively slow…
The challenge in the widely applicable online matching problem lies in making irrevocable assignments while there is uncertainty about future inputs. Most theoretically-grounded policies are myopic or greedy in nature. In real-world…
For robotic vehicles to navigate robustly and safely in unseen environments, it is crucial to decide the most suitable navigation policy. However, most existing deep reinforcement learning based navigation policies are trained with a…
Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…
This paper explores the problem of simultaneously learning a value function and policy in deep actor-critic reinforcement learning models. We find that the common practice of learning these functions jointly is sub-optimal, due to an…
In distributed optimization, the practical problem-solving performance is essentially sensitive to algorithm selection, parameter setting, problem type and data pattern. Thus, it is often laborious to acquire a highly efficient method for a…
Many real-world problems can be reduced to combinatorial optimization on a graph, where the subset or ordering of vertices that maximize some objective function must be found. With such tasks often NP-hard and analytically intractable,…