English
Related papers

Related papers: Generalized Emphatic Temporal Difference Learning:…

200 papers

In reinforcement learning, the TD($\lambda$) algorithm is a fundamental policy evaluation method with an efficient online implementation that is suitable for large-scale problems. One practical drawback of TD($\lambda$) is its sensitivity…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-12-23 Aviv Tamar , Panos Toulis , Shie Mannor , Edoardo M. Airoldi

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

Value functions derived from Markov decision processes arise as a central component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in many statistics and engineering applications of machine learning techniques. Computation of the solution to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Adithya M. Devraj , Ioannis Kontoyiannis , Sean P. Meyn

We introduce learning and planning algorithms for average-reward MDPs, including 1) the first general proven-convergent off-policy model-free control algorithm without reference states, 2) the first proven-convergent off-policy model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Yi Wan , Abhishek Naik , Richard S. Sutton

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a standard and very successful reinforcement learning approach, at the core of both algorithms that learn the value of a given policy, as well as algorithms which learn how to improve policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Mingde Zhao , Sitao Luan , Ian Porada , Xiao-Wen Chang , Doina Precup

Sutton, Szepesv\'{a}ri and Maei introduced the first gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithms compatible with both linear function approximation and off-policy training. The goal of this paper is (a) to propose some variants…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Donghwan Lee , Han-Dong Lim , Jihoon Park , Okyong Choi

Bearing fault detection is a critical task in predictive maintenance, where accurate and timely fault identification can prevent costly downtime and equipment damage. Traditional attention mechanisms in Transformer neural networks often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Marzieh Mirzaeibonehkhater , Mohammad Ali Labbaf-Khaniki , Mohammad Manthouri

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically rely on the assumption that the environment dynamics and value function can be expressed in terms of a Markovian state representation. However, when state information is only partially observable,…

In this paper we extend temporal difference policy evaluation algorithms to performance criteria that include the variance of the cumulative reward. Such criteria are useful for risk management, and are important in domains such as finance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-10-15 Aviv Tamar , Dotan Di Castro , Shie Mannor

The use of target networks has been a popular and key component of recent deep Q-learning algorithms for reinforcement learning, yet little is known from the theory side. In this work, we introduce a new family of target-based temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Donghwan Lee , Niao He

The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained via a behavior policy. However, because the contextual bandit algorithm updates the policy based on past observations, the samples are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Masahiro Kato , Yusuke Kaneko

Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Rui Yan

Exploration in sparse reward environments remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly in Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs), where environments differ across episodes. Existing episodic intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Yuhua Jiang , Qihan Liu , Yiqin Yang , Xiaoteng Ma , Dianyu Zhong , Hao Hu , Jun Yang , Bin Liang , Bo Xu , Chongjie Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao

The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement learning (RL)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-23 Donghwan Lee , Hyungjin Yoon , Naira Hovakimyan

While the classic off-policy evaluation (OPE) literature commonly assumes decision time points to be evenly spaced for simplicity, in many real-world scenarios, such as those involving user-initiated visits, decisions are made at…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-17 Xin Chen , Wenbin Lu , Shu Yang , Dipankar Bandyopadhyay

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a standard and very successful reinforcement learning approach, at the core of both algorithms that learn the value of a given policy, as well as algorithms which learn how to improve policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Mingde Zhao

Addressing such diverse ends as safety alignment with human preferences, and the efficiency of learning, a growing line of reinforcement learning research focuses on risk functionals that depend on the entire distribution of returns. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Audrey Huang , Liu Leqi , Zachary Chase Lipton , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

Doubly robust methods hold considerable promise for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under sequential ignorability: They have been shown to converge as $1/\sqrt{T}$ with the horizon $T$, to be statistically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-30 Mohammad Mehrabi , Stefan Wager

Real-life machine learning problems exhibit distributional shifts in the data from one time to another or from one place to another. This behavior is beyond the scope of the traditional empirical risk minimization paradigm, which assumes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Timothy DeLise