Researcher profile

Joery A. de Vries

Joery A. de Vries contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

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

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a widely used approach for policy improvement through search with increasing popularity for real world applications. Due to the sequential and deterministic nature of its search, runtime-scaling of MCTS with parallel compute remains a major challenge. We introduce Particle MCTS (PMCTS), to our knowledge the first principled parallel MCTS algorithm which is suited for neural network evaluations and can preserve formal policy improvement guarantees. Empirically, PMCTS scales well with parallel compute and significantly outperforms the popular heuristic-based baselines across domains.

preprint2022arXiv

On Credit Assignment in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) has held longstanding promise to advance reinforcement learning. Yet, it has remained a considerable challenge to develop practical algorithms that exhibit some of these promises. To improve our fundamental understanding of HRL, we investigate hierarchical credit assignment from the perspective of conventional multistep reinforcement learning. We show how e.g., a 1-step `hierarchical backup' can be seen as a conventional multistep backup with $n$ skip connections over time connecting each subsequent state to the first independent of actions inbetween. Furthermore, we find that generalizing hierarchy to multistep return estimation methods requires us to consider how to partition the environment trace, in order to construct backup paths. We leverage these insight to develop a new hierarchical algorithm Hier$Q_k(λ)$, for which we demonstrate that hierarchical credit assignment alone can already boost agent performance (i.e., when eliminating generalization or exploration). Altogether, our work yields fundamental insight into the nature of hierarchical backups and distinguishes this as an additional basis for reinforcement learning research.

preprint2021arXiv

Visualizing MuZero Models

MuZero, a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that uses a value equivalent dynamics model, achieved state-of-the-art performance in Chess, Shogi and the game of Go. In contrast to standard forward dynamics models that predict a full next state, value equivalent models are trained to predict a future value, thereby emphasizing value relevant information in the representations. While value equivalent models have shown strong empirical success, there is no research yet that visualizes and investigates what types of representations these models actually learn. Therefore, in this paper we visualize the latent representation of MuZero agents. We find that action trajectories may diverge between observation embeddings and internal state transition dynamics, which could lead to instability during planning. Based on this insight, we propose two regularization techniques to stabilize MuZero's performance. Additionally, we provide an open-source implementation of MuZero along with an interactive visualizer of learned representations, which may aid further investigation of value equivalent algorithms.