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The combination of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and deep reinforcement learning is state-of-the-art in two-player perfect-information games. In this paper, we describe a search algorithm that uses a variant of MCTS which we enhanced by 1)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Arta Seify , Michael Buro

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have significantly enhanced the agentic capabilities of large language models (LLMs). In long-term and multi-turn agent tasks, existing approaches driven solely by outcome rewards often suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Yuxiang Ji , Ziyu Ma , Yong Wang , Guanhua Chen , Xiangxiang Chu , Liaoni Wu

Decision-making under uncertainty (DMU) is present in many important problems. An open challenge is DMU in non-stationary environments, where the dynamics of the environment can change over time. Reinforcement Learning (RL), a popular…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Geoffrey Pettet , Ayan Mukhopadhyay , Abhishek Dubey

Policy tree search is a family of tree search algorithms that use a policy to guide the search. These algorithms provide guarantees on the number of expansions required to solve a given problem that are based on the quality of the policy.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Jake Tuero , Michael Buro , Levi H. S. Lelis

Policy gradient lies at the core of deep reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous domains. Despite much success, it is often observed in practice that RL training with policy gradient can fail for many reasons, even on standard control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Tao Wang , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

We introduce an approach aimed at enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through an iterative preference learning process inspired by the successful strategy employed by AlphaZero. Our work leverages Monte…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yuxi Xie , Anirudh Goyal , Wenyue Zheng , Min-Yen Kan , Timothy P. Lillicrap , Kenji Kawaguchi , Michael Shieh

Tree-based models are widely recognized for their interpretability and have proven effective in various application domains, particularly in high-stakes domains. However, learning decision trees (DTs) poses a significant challenge due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Sascha Marton

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a powerful algorithm for solving complex decision-making problems. This paper presents an optimized MCTS implementation applied to the FrozenLake environment, a classic reinforcement learning task…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Esteban Aldana Guerra

Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Kaiqing Zhang , Alec Koppel , Hao Zhu , Tamer Başar

We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Michael Lu , Matin Aghaei , Anant Raj , Sharan Vaswani

Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 W. J. A. van Heeswijk

We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Adrien Bolland , Ioannis Boukas , Mathias Berger , Damien Ernst

Traditional model-based reinforcement learning approaches learn a model of the environment dynamics without explicitly considering how it will be used by the agent. In the presence of misspecified model classes, this can lead to poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Pierluca D'Oro , Alberto Maria Metelli , Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restelli

Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Peter Henderson , Joshua Romoff , Joelle Pineau

We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Shalabh Bhatnagar

Since its introduction a decade ago, \emph{relative entropy policy search} (REPS) has demonstrated successful policy learning on a number of simulated and real-world robotic domains, not to mention providing algorithmic components used by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Aldo Pacchiano , Jonathan Lee , Peter Bartlett , Ofir Nachum

In this work, we consider the popular tree-based search strategy within the framework of reinforcement learning, the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), in the context of infinite-horizon discounted cost Markov Decision Process (MDP). While…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-14 Devavrat Shah , Qiaomin Xie , Zhi Xu

Recent advances in reasoning with large language models (LLMs) have shown the effectiveness of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for generating high quality intermediate trajectories, particularly in math and symbolic domains. Inspired by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Bingning Huang , Tu Nguyen , Matthieu Zimmer