A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Enhances RL performance with a population-guided parallel learning scheme.
Deep neuroevolution, that is evolutionary policy search methods based on deep neural networks, have recently emerged as a competitor to deep reinforcement learning algorithms due to their better parallelization capabilities. However, these methods still suffer from a far worse sample efficiency. In this paper we invest…
Unified framework for policy improvement in RL with benefits in data efficiency and computation.
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms have achieved great success on many challenging benchmarks (e.g., Computer Go). However, they generally require a large number of rollouts, making their applications costly. Furthermore, it is also extremely challenging to parallelize MCTS due to its inherent sequential nature:…
Parallelizes MCTS for continuous domains using leaf and root parallelization.
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms perform simulation-based search to improve policies online. During search, the simulation policy is adapted to explore the most promising lines of play. MCTS has been used by state-of-the-art programs for many problems, however a disadvantage to MCTS is that it estimates the va…
Bayesian approach for policy search in stochastic domains.
A single policy suffices for near-optimal parallel exploration in RL.
Trust-region methods have yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search. A common approach is to use KL-divergence to bound the region of trust resulting in a natural gradient policy update. We show that the natural gradient and trust region optimization are equivalent if we use the natural parameterization of a st…
Chemical space is so large that brute force searches for new interesting molecules are infeasible. High-throughput virtual screening via computer cluster simulations can speed up the discovery process by collecting very large amounts of data in parallel, e.g., up to hundreds or thousands of parallel measurements. Bayes…
PHS optimizes hyperparameters in parallel for expensive computations.
Direct contextual policy search methods learn to improve policy parameters and simultaneously generalize these parameters to different context or task variables. However, learning from high-dimensional context variables, such as camera images, is still a prominent problem in many real-world tasks. A naive application o…
Methods for learning to search for structured prediction typically imitate a reference policy, with existing theoretical guarantees demonstrating low regret compared to that reference. This is unsatisfactory in many applications where the reference policy is suboptimal and the goal of learning is to improve upon it. Ca…
Optimal transport kernels improve neural architecture search efficiency.
It is well known that the historical logs are used for evaluating and learning policies in interactive systems, e.g. recommendation, search, and online advertising. Since direct online policy learning usually harms user experiences, it is more crucial to apply off-policy learning in real-world applications instead. Tho…
We introduce a new sampling method for large language models that balances diversity and parallelism.
Learning policies on data synthesized by models can in principle quench the thirst of reinforcement learning algorithms for large amounts of real experience, which is often costly to acquire. However, simulating plausible experience de novo is a hard problem for many complex environments, often resulting in biases for …
Rate change calculations in the literature involve deterministic methods that measure the change in premium for a given policy. The definition of rate change as a statistical parameter is proposed to address the stochastic nature of the premium charged for a policy. It promotes the idea that rate change is a property o…
This paper studies effective parallelization of MCTS for computer games.
Paper shows MCTS approximates policy optimization, proposing an improved variant.
Simple policy search outperforms advanced learnable test-time augmentation techniques.
Paper proposes MCTSPO for better reinforcement learning policy optimization.
We propose a novel neural architecture search algorithm via reinforcement learning by decoupling structure and operation search processes. Our approach samples candidate models from the multinomial distribution on the policy vectors defined on the two search spaces independently. The proposed technique improves the eff…
New methods use vector search and nearest-neighbor matching for policy learning in causal inference.
Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different task contexts. Contextual policy search offers data-efficient learning and generalization by explicitly conditioning the policy on a parametric context space. In this paper…
New adaptive temperature selection improves parallel tempering efficiency.
Beam search is widely used for approximate decoding in structured prediction problems. Models often use a beam at test time but ignore its existence at train time, and therefore do not explicitly learn how to use the beam. We develop an unifying meta-algorithm for learning beam search policies using imitation learning.…
Early stopping method saves up to 75% computation time in policy search tasks.
In quadruped gait learning, policy search methods that scale high dimensional continuous action spaces are commonly used. In most approaches, it is necessary to introduce prior knowledge on the gaits to limit the highly non-convex search space of the policies. In this work, we propose a new approach to encode the symme…
Bayesian optimization improves policy search in reinforcement learning.
PRISM integrates diverse rewards in MORL, improving sample efficiency and Pareto coverage.
This paper improves self-play learning in games by manipulating experience distributions.
Transformer learns to search through reinforcement learning, mimicking DFS.
Safe RL for autonomous vehicles using PCPO with trust regions and parallel learners.
Paper proposes a policy-search algorithm to learn entropy-maximizing exploration policies in reward-free environments.
Contextual policy search allows adapting robotic movement primitives to different situations. For instance, a locomotion primitive might be adapted to different terrain inclinations or desired walking speeds. Such an adaptation is often achievable by modifying a small number of hyperparameters. However, learning, when …
AgEBO-Tabular combines NAS and hyperparameter tuning for fast, high-performing tabular models.
Study improves policy search in continuous control by using heavy-tailed distributions.
New method learns better branching policies for MILP problems.
A major problem in data augmentation is to ensure that the generated new samples cover the search space. This is a challenging problem and requires exploration for data augmentation policies to ensure their effectiveness in covering the search space. In this paper, we propose Greedy AutoAugment as a highly efficient se…
We study the problem of learning a good search policy for combinatorial search spaces. We propose retrospective imitation learning, which, after initial training by an expert, improves itself by learning from \textit{retrospective inspections} of its own roll-outs. That is, when the policy eventually reaches a feasible…
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 estimates, as some relevant available information is ignored. In this paper, we introd…
The paper proposes an interpretable off-policy learning algorithm for medical treatments.
Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different "contexts". Bayesian optimization approaches to contextual policy search (CPS) offer data-efficient policy learning that generalize over a context space. We propose to impr…
Optimizes Thompson sampling policies using policy gradient methods.
We propose a generalization of the best arm identification problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) to the setting where every pull of an arm is associated with delayed feedback. The delay in feedback increases the effective sample complexity of standard algorithms, but can be offset if we have access to partial…
In this paper, we propose a convergent parallel best-response algorithm with the exact line search for the nondifferentiable nonconvex sparsity-regularized rank minimization problem. On the one hand, it exhibits a faster convergence than subgradient algorithms and block coordinate descent algorithms. On the other hand,…
Robust Policy Search is the problem of learning policies that do not degrade in performance when subject to unseen environment model parameters. It is particularly relevant for transferring policies learned in a simulation environment to the real world. Several existing approaches involve sampling large batches of traj…