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Related papers: Evolution Strategies for Deep RL pretraining

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Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically struggle with achieving effective exploration and are extremely sensitive to the choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Shauharda Khadka , Somdeb Majumdar , Tarek Nassar , Zach Dwiel , Evren Tumer , Santiago Miret , Yinyin Liu , Kagan Tumer

In this work, we propose a novel approach for reinforcement learning driven by evolutionary computation. Our algorithm, dubbed as Evolutionary-Driven Reinforcement Learning (evo-RL), embeds the reinforcement learning algorithm in an…

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

Evolution Strategies (ES) is a class of powerful black-box optimisation methods that are highly parallelisable and can handle non-differentiable and noisy objectives. However, na\"ive ES becomes prohibitively expensive at scale on GPUs due…

In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising method for robot collision avoidance. However, such DRL models often come with limitations, such as adapting effectively to structured environments containing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Max Asselmeier , Zhaoyi Li , Kelin Yu , Danfei Xu

In recent years, Evolutionary Strategies were actively explored in robotic tasks for policy search as they provide a simpler alternative to reinforcement learning algorithms. However, this class of algorithms is often claimed to be…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Vladislav Kurenkov , Bulat Maksudov

The use of robotics in controlled environments has flourished over the last several decades and training robots to perform tasks using control strategies developed from dynamical models of their hardware have proven very effective. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Zach Dwiel , Madhavun Candadai , Mariano Phielipp

Although deep reinforcement learning methods can learn effective policies for challenging problems such as Atari games and robotics tasks, algorithms are complex, and training times are often long. This study investigates how Evolution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Annie Wong , Jacob de Nobel , Thomas Bäck , Aske Plaat , Anna V. Kononova

Deep reinforcement learning has recently achieved strong results in quadrupedal locomotion, yet policies trained in simulation often fail to transfer when the environment changes. Evolutionary reinforcement learning aims to address this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Brian McAteer , Karl Mason

We present a simple, sample-efficient algorithm for introducing large but directed learning steps in reinforcement learning (RL), through the use of evolutionary operators. The methodology uses a population of RL agents training with a…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Harshad Khadilkar

Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have made important achievements in many control tasks, they still suffer from the problems of sample inefficiency and unstable training process, which are usually caused by sparse…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Ke Lin , Liang Gong , Xudong Li , Te Sun , Binhao Chen , Chengliang Liu , Zhengfeng Zhang , Jian Pu , Junping Zhang

Evolution Strategy (ES) is a powerful black-box optimization technique based on the idea of natural evolution. In each of its iterations, a key step entails ranking candidate solutions based on some fitness score. For an ES method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Eshwar S R , Shishir Kolathaya , Gugan Thoppe

Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (ERL), which integrates Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for optimization, has demonstrated remarkable performance advancements. By fusing both approaches, ERL has emerged as…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Pengyi Li , Jianye Hao , Hongyao Tang , Xian Fu , Yan Zheng , Ke Tang

The past few years have seen rapid progress in combining reinforcement learning (RL) with deep learning. Various breakthroughs ranging from games to robotics have spurred the interest in designing sophisticated RL algorithms and systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Zhihui Xie , Zichuan Lin , Junyou Li , Shuai Li , Deheng Ye

In this paper, we study the use of robust model independent bounded extremum seeking (ES) feedback control to improve the robustness of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) controllers for a class of nonlinear time-varying systems. DRL has the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Shaifalee Saxena , Alan Williams , Rafael Fierro , Alexander Scheinker

This work explores learning agent-agnostic synthetic environments (SEs) for Reinforcement Learning. SEs act as a proxy for target environments and allow agents to be trained more efficiently than when directly trained on the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Fabio Ferreira , Thomas Nierhoff , Frank Hutter

Derivative-based optimization techniques such as Stochastic Gradient Descent has been wildly successful in training deep neural networks. However, it has constraints such as end-to-end network differentiability. As an alternative, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-08-17 Ahmed Aly , Joanne B. Dugan

Evolutionary algorithms (EA), a class of stochastic search methods based on the principles of natural evolution, have received widespread acclaim for their exceptional performance in various real-world optimization problems. While…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Yanjie Song , Yutong Wu , Yangyang Guo , Ran Yan , P. N. Suganthan , Yue Zhang , Witold Pedrycz , Swagatam Das , Rammohan Mallipeddi , Oladayo Solomon Ajani. Qiang Feng

Animals often demonstrate a remarkable ability to adapt to their environments during their lifetime. They do so partly due to the evolution of morphological and neural structures. These structures capture features of environments shared…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Corentin Léger , Gautier Hamon , Eleni Nisioti , Xavier Hinaut , Clément Moulin-Frier

Reinforcement learning (RL) applications, where an agent can simply learn optimal behaviors by interacting with the environment, are quickly gaining tremendous success in a wide variety of applications from controlling simple pendulums to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-28 Mariam Kiran , Melis Ozyildirim