Joined October 2020
I’ll be presenting GBRL next Wednesday at ICML this year. Come chat! #icml2025
Gradient Boosting Reinforcement Learning Neural networks (NN) achieve remarkable results in various tasks, but lack key characteristics: interpretability, support for categorical features, and lightweight implementations suitable for edge devices. While ongoing efforts aim to address these challenges, Gradient Boosting Trees (GBT) inherently meet these requirements. As a result, GBTs have become the go-to method for supervised learning tasks in many real-world applications and competitions. However, their application in online learning scenarios, notably in reinforcement learning (RL), has been limited. In this work, we bridge this gap by introducing Gradient-Boosting RL (GBRL), a framework that extends the advantages of GBT to the RL domain. Using the GBRL framework, we implement various actor-critic algorithms and compare their performance with their NN counterparts. Inspired by shared backbones in NN we introduce a tree-sharing approach for policy and value functions with distinct learning rates, enhancing learning efficiency over millions of interactions. GBRL achieves competitive performance across a diverse array of tasks, excelling in domains with structured or categorical features.
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Heading to #ICML2025 to share our GBRL poster! • Gradient-boosted trees for RL • Strong performance & OOD robustness • CUDA-fast, SB3-ready, lightweight deployment Let’s talk in Vancouver! 📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2407.08250 💻 github.com/NVlabs/gbrl @DalalGal @ChenTessler #RL #AI
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