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General Video Game Playing (GVGP) is a field of Artificial Intelligence where agents play a variety of real-time video games that are unknown in advance. This limits the use of domain-specific heuristics. Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Dennis J. N. J. Soemers , Chiara F. Sironi , Torsten Schuster , Mark H. M. Winands

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Alessandro Montenegro , Leonardo Cesani , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

We revisit the estimation bias in policy gradients for the discounted episodic Markov decision process (MDP) from Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) perspective. The objective is formulated theoretically as the expected returns discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Haoxuan Pan , Deheng Ye , Xiaoming Duan , Qiang Fu , Wei Yang , Jianping He , Mingfei Sun

Efficient exploration is a central problem in reinforcement learning and is often formalized as maximizing the entropy of the state-action occupancy measure. While unconstrained maximum-entropy exploration is relatively well understood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Florian Wolf , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

There is a growing desire in the field of reinforcement learning (and machine learning in general) to move from black-box models toward more "interpretable AI." We improve interpretability of reinforcement learning by increasing the utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Aaron M. Roth , Nicholay Topin , Pooyan Jamshidi , Manuela Veloso

Guided policy search algorithms can be used to optimize complex nonlinear policies, such as deep neural networks, without directly computing policy gradients in the high-dimensional parameter space. Instead, these methods use supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-18 William Montgomery , Sergey Levine

We revisit the finite time analysis of policy gradient methods in the one of the simplest settings: finite state and action MDPs with a policy class consisting of all stochastic policies and with exact gradient evaluations. There has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Jalaj Bhandari , Daniel Russo

Decision trees are a crucial class of models offering robust predictive performance and inherent interpretability across various domains, including healthcare, finance, and logistics. However, current tree induction methods often face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Tennison Liu , Nicolas Huynh , Mihaela van der Schaar

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Xin Chen , Yifan Hu , Minda Zhao

We consider the neighborhood tree induced by alternating the use of different neighborhood structures within a local search descent. We investigate the issue of designing a search strategy operating at the neighborhood tree level by…

Other Computer Science · Computer Science 2013-01-01 Houda Derbel , Bilel Derbel

A novel Policy Gradient (PG) algorithm, called $\textit{Matryoshka Policy Gradient}$ (MPG), is introduced and studied, in the context of fixed-horizon max-entropy reinforcement learning, where an agent aims at maximizing entropy bonuses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 François Ged , Maria Han Veiga

We study the problem of computing an optimal policy of an infinite-horizon discounted constrained Markov decision process (constrained MDP). Despite the popularity of Lagrangian-based policy search methods used in practice, the oscillation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-18 Dongsheng Ding , Chen-Yu Wei , Kaiqing Zhang , Alejandro Ribeiro

Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Shiv Shankar , Martha White , Sridhar Mahadevan , Philip S. Thomas

We introduce a novel policy learning method that integrates analytical gradients from differentiable environments with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To incorporate analytical gradients into the PPO framework, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Sanghyun Son , Laura Yu Zheng , Ryan Sullivan , Yi-Ling Qiao , Ming C. Lin

This paper proposes a novel reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm using improved Monte Carlo tree search (IMCTS) formulation for discrete optimum design of truss structures. IMCTS with multiple root nodes includes update process, the best…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Fu-Yao Ko , Katsuyuki Suzuki , Kazuo Yonekura

Non-monotone object rearrangement planning in confined spaces such as cabinets and shelves is a widely occurring but challenging problem in robotics. Both the robot motion and the available regions for object relocation are highly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Hanwen Ren , Ahmed H. Qureshi

We propose a new approach to the problem of searching a space of policies for a Markov decision process (MDP) or a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), given a model. Our approach is based on the following observation: Any…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Andrew Y. Ng , Michael I. Jordan

This paper studies a policy optimization problem arising from collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning in a decentralized setting where agents communicate with their neighbors over an undirected graph to maximize the sum of their…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Jinchi Chen , Jie Feng , Weiguo Gao , Ke Wei

We study policy optimization for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple reward value functions, which are to be jointly optimized according to given criteria such as proportional fairness (smooth concave scalarization), hard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara