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Temporal difference learning with linear function approximation is a popular method to obtain a low-dimensional approximation of the value function of a policy in a Markov Decision Process. We give a new interpretation of this method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Rui Liu , Alex Olshevsky

Relative temporal-difference (TD) learning was introduced to mitigate the slow convergence of TD methods when the discount factor approaches one by subtracting a baseline from the temporal-difference update. While this idea has been studied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Masoud S. Sakha , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar , Sean Meyn

We propose and analyze an alternate approach to off-policy multi-step temporal difference learning, in which off-policy returns are corrected with the current Q-function in terms of rewards, rather than with the target policy in terms of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-08-12 Anna Harutyunyan , Marc G. Bellemare , Tom Stepleton , Remi Munos

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a general and very useful tool for estimating the value function of a given policy, which in turn is required to find good policies. Generally speaking, TD learning updates states whenever they are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Nishanth Anand , Doina Precup

We extend temporal-difference (TD) learning in order to obtain risk-sensitive, model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. This extension can be regarded as modification of the Rescorla-Wagner rule, where the (sigmoidal) stimulus is taken…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Grégoire Delétang , Jordi Grau-Moya , Markus Kunesch , Tim Genewein , Rob Brekelmans , Shane Legg , Pedro A. Ortega

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental technique in reinforcement learning that updates value estimates for states or state-action pairs using a TD target. This target represents an improved estimate of the true value by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Wuhao Wang , Zhiyong Chen , Lepeng Zhang

We study the problem of temporal-difference-based policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. In particular, we analyse the use of a distributional reinforcement learning algorithm, quantile temporal-difference learning (QTD), for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Mark Rowland , Yunhao Tang , Clare Lyle , Rémi Munos , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning methods, such as Q-Learning, have proven effective at learning a policy to perform control tasks. One issue with methods like Q-Learning is that the value update introduces bias when predicting the TD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Litian Liang , Yaosheng Xu , Stephen McAleer , Dailin Hu , Alexander Ihler , Pieter Abbeel , Roy Fox

Q-learning is a reliable but inefficient off-policy temporal-difference method, backing up reward only one step at a time. Replacing traces, using a recency heuristic, are more efficient but less reliable. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Mitchell Keith Bloch

Temporal-difference (TD) learning is highly effective at controlling and evaluating an agent's long-term outcomes. Most approaches in this paradigm implement a semi-gradient update to boost the learning speed, which consists of ignoring the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Théo Vincent , Kevin Gerhardt , Yogesh Tripathi , Habib Maraqten , Adam White , Martha White , Jan Peters , Carlo D'Eramo

We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning in discounted Markov decision processes, where the goal is to evaluate a policy in a model-free way by using observations of a state process generated without executing the policy. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Huizhen Yu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Richard S. Sutton

Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Ray Jiang , Tom Zahavy , Zhongwen Xu , Adam White , Matteo Hessel , Charles Blundell , Hado van Hasselt

We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model. We establish both asymptotic and non-asymptotic versions of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-17 Koulik Khamaru , Ashwin Pananjady , Feng Ruan , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

Temporal Difference learning or TD($\lambda$) is a fundamental algorithm in the field of reinforcement learning. However, setting TD's $\lambda$ parameter, which controls the timescale of TD updates, is generally left up to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-02 Timothy A. Mann , Hugo Penedones , Shie Mannor , Todd Hester

Learning rate is a critical component of reinforcement learning (RL). This work uses global and local clocks to distinguish two types of learning rates. The former is of the standard form $\alpha_t$ that depends only on the time step $t$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 David Antrobius , Shangtong Zhang

We investigate whether Jacobi preconditioning, accounting for the bootstrap term in temporal difference (TD) learning, can help boost performance of adaptive optimizers. Our method, TDprop, computes a per parameter learning rate based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Joshua Romoff , Peter Henderson , David Kanaa , Emmanuel Bengio , Ahmed Touati , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Joelle Pineau

Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms with neural network function parameterization have well-established empirical success in many practical large-scale reinforcement learning tasks. However, theoretical understanding of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Zhifa Ke , Zaiwen Wen , Junyu Zhang

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Kaicheng Jin , Yang Peng , Jiansheng Yang , Zhihua Zhang

We consider the core reinforcement-learning problem of on-policy value function approximation from a batch of trajectory data, and focus on various issues of Temporal Difference (TD) learning and Monte Carlo (MC) policy evaluation. The two…

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful, general tool for learning complex behaviors. However, its sample efficiency is often impractically large for solving challenging real-world problems, even with off-policy algorithms such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Vitchyr Pong , Shixiang Gu , Murtaza Dalal , Sergey Levine