arXiv Machine Learning

PMCTS: Principled Parallelized Inference Time Scaling with Particle Monte Carlo Tree Search

The paper introduces Particle MCTS (PMCTS), a parallelized version of Monte Carlo Tree Search designed for GPU acceleration and batch-parallel neural network evaluations. PMCTS preserves policy improvement guarantees of modern MCTS algorithms while scaling efficiently with parallel compute. Empirical results show that PMCTS consistently outperforms or matches heuristic-based baselines across various MCTS and reinforcement learning domains, including chess, Go, and both discrete and continuous control benchmarks.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Is Monte Carlo Tree Search Just Every-Visit Monte Carlo Control?

The article argues that Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and every‑visit Monte Carlo (MC) control are essentially the same method, differing only in terminology and presentation. It shows that MCTS’s four stages—selection, expansion, simulation, and backup—can be reduced to two core operations: sampling trajectories under the current policy and performing every‑visit MC updates. The note aims to make this equivalence explicit and easier to recognize.

By Xianyi Wu
arXiv AI
Jul 10

Principled Analysis of Deep Reinforcement Learning Evaluation and Design Paradigms

arXiv:2607. 07769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Starting from the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the state-action value function that led to winning one of the most challenging games, to algorithmic advancements that allowed solving problems without even explicitly stating the rules of the challenge at hand, reinforcement learning research has been the center of remarkable scientific progress for the past decade.

By Ezgi Korkmaz
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Agentic Monte Carlo: Simulating Reinforcement Learning for Black-Box Agents

arXiv:2606. 05296v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents operate in two distinct regimes: open-weight agents amenable to reinforcement learning (RL) and black-box agents whose behaviour must be controlled purely at test time.

By Dae Yon Hwang, Raunaq Suri, Valentin Villecroze, Anthony L. Caterini, Jesse C. Cresswell, No\"el Vouitsis, Brendan Leigh Ross
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 1

Two-Fidelity Best-Action Identification for Stochastic Minimax Tree

We study fixed-confidence best-action identification (BAI) in stochastic minimax trees. This problem is increasingly relevant in modern AI planning, where deep minimax search and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with language model long rollouts face a fundamental tradeoff: heuristic evaluations are cheap but biased, while accurate rollouts are reliable but prohibitively expensive.