Related papers: $\ell_1$ Regularized Gradient Temporal-Difference …

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…

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…

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

One of the most basic problems in reinforcement learning (RL) is policy evaluation: estimating the long-term return, i.e., value function, corresponding to a given fixed policy. The celebrated Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm…

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)…

This paper revisits the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm for the policy evaluation tasks in reinforcement learning. Typically, the performance of TD(0) and TD($\lambda$) is very sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Oftentimes,…

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…

We study policy evaluation problems in multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) under a low-rank representation setting. In this setting, we are given $N$ learning tasks where the corresponding value function of these tasks lie in an…

Neural Temporal Difference (TD) Learning is an approximate temporal difference method for policy evaluation that uses a neural network for function approximation. Analysis of Neural TD Learning has proven to be challenging. In this paper we…

Off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning with function approximation faces a structural tradeoff among stability, projection geometry, and variance control. Emphatic TD (ETD) improves the off-policy projection geometry through follow-on…

Building deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that find a good policy with few samples has proven notoriously challenging. To achieve sample efficiency, recent work has explored updating neural networks with large numbers of gradient…

In this paper we present the first empirical study of the emphatic temporal-difference learning algorithm (ETD), comparing it with conventional temporal-difference learning, in particular, with linear TD(0), on on-policy and off-policy…

Emphatic Temporal Difference (ETD) learning has recently been proposed as a convergent off-policy learning method. ETD was proposed mainly to address convergence issues of conventional Temporal Difference (TD) learning under off-policy…

Specifying a Reinforcement Learning (RL) task involves choosing a suitable planning horizon, which is typically modeled by a discount factor. It is known that applying RL algorithms with a lower discount factor can act as a regularizer,…

This is a companion note to our recent study of the weak convergence properties of constrained emphatic temporal-difference learning (ETD) algorithms from a theoretic perspective. It supplements the latter analysis with simulation results…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Gradient descent or its variants are popular in training neural networks. However, in deep Q-learning with neural network approximation, a type of reinforcement learning, gradient descent (also known as Residual Gradient (RG)) is barely…

TD(0) is one of the most commonly used algorithms in reinforcement learning. Despite this, there is no existing finite sample analysis for TD(0) with function approximation, even for the linear case. Our work is the first to provide such…

Temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it combines ideas from dynamic programming and Monte Carlo methods in a way that allows for online and incremental model-free learning. A key idea of…

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…