Related papers: Adaptive Lambda Least-Squares Temporal Difference …

Modern deep reinforcement learning methods have departed from the incremental learning required for eligibility traces, rendering the implementation of the $\lambda$-return difficult in this context. In particular, off-policy methods that…

Linear temporal logic (LTL) is a specification language for finite sequences (called traces) widely used in program verification, motion planning in robotics, process mining, and many other areas. We consider the problem of learning LTL…

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…

Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…

Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to…

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…

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference (TD) is the most direct algorithm to learn the value function of a policy. For large or infinite state spaces, exact representations of the value function are usually not available, and it must…

This document is a guide to the implementation of true online emphatic TD($\lambda$), a model-free temporal-difference algorithm for learning to make long-term predictions which combines the emphasis idea (Sutton, Mahmood & White 2015) and…

This paper analyzes multi-step temporal difference (TD)-learning algorithms within the ``deadly triad'' scenario, characterized by linear function approximation, off-policy learning, and bootstrapping. In particular, we prove that $n$-step…

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning with nonlinear smooth function approximation for policy evaluation has achieved great success in modern reinforcement learning. It is shown that such a problem can be reformulated as a stochastic…

The total least squares~(TLS) method is widely used in data-fitting. Compared with the least squares fitting method, the TLS fitting takes into account not only observation errors, but also errors from the measurement matrix of the…

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to generate candidate tokens for a larger target model to verify. The efficacy of this technique hinges on the trade-off between the time…

Robust estimators for linear regression require non-convex objective functions to shield against adverse affects of outliers. This non-convexity brings challenges, particularly when combined with penalization in high-dimensional settings.…

We consider the problem of finding a control policy for a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to maximize the probability of reaching some states while avoiding some other states. This problem is motivated by applications in robotics, where such…

Active learning is a machine learning paradigm that aims to improve the performance of a model by strategically selecting and querying unlabeled data. One effective selection strategy is to base it on the model's predictive uncertainty,…

The tuning parameter selection strategy for penalized estimation is crucial to identify a model that is both interpretable and predictive. However, popular strategies (e.g., minimizing average squared prediction error via cross-validation)…

Multitask learning (MTL) aims to develop a unified model that can handle a set of closely related tasks simultaneously. By optimizing the model across multiple tasks, MTL generally surpasses its non-MTL counterparts in terms of…

Self-adaptive large language models (LLMs) aim to solve the challenges posed by traditional fine-tuning methods, which are often computationally intensive and static in their ability to handle diverse tasks. We introduce…

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…

One of the fundamental challenges associated with reinforcement learning (RL) is that collecting sufficient data can be both time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we formalize a concept of time reversal symmetry in a Markov decision…