Related papers: Implicit Temporal Differences
The problem of on-line off-policy evaluation (OPE) has been actively studied in the last decade due to its importance both as a stand-alone problem and as a module in a policy improvement scheme. However, most Temporal Difference (TD) based…
The average reward is a fundamental performance metric in reinforcement learning (RL) focusing on the long-run performance of an agent. Differential temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms are a major advance for average reward RL as…
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…
Value functions arise as a component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in statistics and engineering applications. Computation of the associated Bellman equations is numerically challenging in all but a few special cases. A…
We study the convergence behavior of the celebrated temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithm. By looking at the algorithm through the lens of optimization, we first argue that TD can be viewed as an iterative optimization algorithm where…
The temporal-difference methods TD($\lambda$) and Sarsa($\lambda$) form a core part of modern reinforcement learning. Their appeal comes from their good performance, low computational cost, and their simple interpretation, given by their…
Many reinforcement learning approaches rely on temporal-difference (TD) learning to learn a critic. However, TD-learning updates can be high variance. Here, we introduce a model-based RL framework, Taylor TD, which reduces this variance in…
In reinforcement learning (RL), temporal difference (TD) errors are widely adopted for optimizing value and policy functions. However, since the TD error is defined by a bootstrap method, its computation tends to be noisy and destabilize…
We consider large linear and nonlinear fixed point problems, and solution with proximal algorithms. We show that there is a close connection between two seemingly different types of methods from distinct fields: 1) Proximal iterations for…
The goal of this manuscript is to conduct a controltheoretic analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithms. TD-learning serves as a cornerstone in the realm of reinforcement learning, offering a methodology for approximating the…
It is still common to use Q-learning and temporal difference (TD) learning-even though they have divergence issues and sound Gradient TD alternatives exist-because divergence seems rare and they typically perform well. However, recent work…
In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…
We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…
In this paper, we study the Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear value function approximation. It is well known that most TD learning algorithms are unstable with linear function approximation and off-policy learning. Recent…
We consider emphatic temporal-difference learning algorithms for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes with finite spaces. Such algorithms were recently proposed by Sutton, Mahmood, and White (2015) as an improved…
Multi-step temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it unifies one-step TD learning with Monte Carlo methods in a way where intermediate algorithms can outperform either extreme. They address…
Given a dataset on actions and resulting long-term rewards, a direct estimation approach fits value functions that minimize prediction error on the training data. Temporal difference learning (TD) methods instead fit value functions by…
Learning the value function of a given policy (target policy) from the data samples obtained from a different policy (behavior policy) is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This problem is studied under the setting of…
Gradient Temporal Difference (GTD) algorithms (Sutton et al., 2008, 2009) are the first $O(d)$ ($d$ is the number features) algorithms that have convergence guarantees for off-policy learning with linear function approximation. Liu et al.…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, but the vanilla TD can substantially suffer from the inherent optimization variance. A variance reduced TD (VRTD) algorithm was…