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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

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

The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haoxing Tian , Zaiwei Chen , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

We develop a form Thompson sampling for online learning under full feedback - also known as prediction with expert advice - where the learner's prior is defined over the space of an adversary's future actions, rather than the space of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Alexander Terenin , Jeffrey Negrea

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

Decision-focused learning (DFL) is an increasingly popular paradigm for training predictive models whose outputs are used in decision-making tasks. Instead of merely optimizing for predictive accuracy, DFL trains models to directly minimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Aymeric Capitaine , Maxime Haddouche , Eric Moulines , Michael I. Jordan , Etienne Boursier , Alain Durmus

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is a pivotal task in product and content recommendation, where learning effective feature embeddings is of great significance. However, traditional methods typically learn fixed feature representations…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Chen Zhu , Liang Du , Hong Chen , Shuang Zhao , Zixun Sun , Xin Wang , Wenwu Zhu

In this paper we investigate the use of reinforcement-learning based prediction approaches for a real drinking-water treatment plant. Developing such a prediction system is a critical step on the path to optimizing and automating water…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Muhammad Kamran Janjua , Haseeb Shah , Martha White , Erfan Miahi , Marlos C. Machado , Adam White

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Kavosh Asadi , Shoham Sabach , Yao Liu , Omer Gottesman , Rasool Fakoor

In this paper, we demonstrate how to learn the objective function of a decision-maker while only observing the problem input data and the decision-maker's corresponding decisions over multiple rounds. We present exact algorithms for this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-31 Andreas Bärmann , Alexander Martin , Sebastian Pokutta , Oskar Schneider

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Michele Garibbo , Maxime Robeyns , Laurence Aitchison

Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation (linear TD) is a classic and powerful prediction algorithm in reinforcement learning. While it is well-understood that linear TD converges almost surely to a unique point,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang

Online-learning research has mainly been focusing on minimizing one objective function. In many real-world applications, however, several objective functions have to be considered simultaneously. Recently, an algorithm for dealing with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-21 Guy Uziel , Ran El-Yaniv

We introduce a generalization of temporal-difference (TD) learning to networks of interrelated predictions. Rather than relating a single prediction to itself at a later time, as in conventional TD methods, a TD network relates each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-04-22 Richard S. Sutton , Brian Tanner

Because reinforcement learning suffers from a lack of scalability, online value (and Q-) function approximation has received increasing interest this last decade. This contribution introduces a novel approximation scheme, namely the Kalman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-06-13 Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise due to its sample efficiency, but still struggles with long-horizon sparse-reward tasks, especially in offline settings where the agent learns from a fixed dataset. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Rohan Chitnis , Yingchen Xu , Bobak Hashemi , Lucas Lehnert , Urun Dogan , Zheqing Zhu , Olivier Delalleau

Using insight from numerical approximation of ODEs and the problem formulation and solution methodology of TD learning through a Galerkin relaxation, I propose a new class of TD learning algorithms. After applying the improved numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Caleb Bowyer

Policy Distillation (PD) has become an effective method to improve deep reinforcement learning tasks. The core idea of PD is to distill policy knowledge from a teacher agent to a student agent. However, the teacher-student framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Xinqiang Yu , Chuanguang Yang , Chengqing Yu , Libo Huang , Zhulin An , Yongjun Xu

Contemporary applications, such as recommendation systems and mobile health monitoring, require real-time processing and analysis of sequentially arriving high-dimensional tensor data. Traditional offline learning, involving the storage and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-16 Xin Wen , Will Wei Sun , Yichen Zhang

Reinforcement learning has emerged as one of the prominent topics attracting attention in modern statistical learning, with policy evaluation being a key component. Unlike the traditional machine learning literature on this topic, our work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-04 Weidong Liu , Jiyuan Tu , Xi Chen , Yichen Zhang