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In this paper, a new reinforcement learning (RL) method known as the method of temporal differential is introduced. Compared to the traditional temporal-difference learning method, it plays a crucial role in developing novel RL techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Tao Bian , Zhong-Ping Jiang

Predictive control approaches based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have gained significant attention in microgrid energy optimization. However, existing research often overlooks the issue of uncertainty stemming from imperfect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Fulong Yao , Wanqing Zhao , Matthew Forshaw

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

We propose a unified framework to study policy evaluation (PE) and the associated temporal difference (TD) methods for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space. We show that PE is equivalent to maintaining the martingale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental algorithm for estimating value functions in reinforcement learning. Recent finite-time analyses of TD with linear function approximation quantify its theoretical convergence rate. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yunxiang Li , Mark Schmidt , Reza Babanezhad , Sharan Vaswani

In this paper we provide a rigorous convergence analysis of a "off"-policy temporal difference learning algorithm with linear function approximation and per time-step linear computational complexity in "online" learning environment. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-20 Prasenjit Karmakar , Rajkumar Maity , Shalabh Bhatnagar

In this paper we revisit the method of off-policy corrections for reinforcement learning (COP-TD) pioneered by Hallak et al. (2017). Under this method, online updates to the value function are reweighted to avoid divergence issues typical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Carles Gelada , Marc G. Bellemare

We investigate the explainability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies from a temporal perspective, focusing on the sequence of future outcomes associated with individual actions. In RL, value functions compress information about rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Franco Ruggeri , Alessio Russo , Rafia Inam , Karl Henrik Johansson

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a cornerstone of reinforcement learning. In the average-reward setting, standard TD($\lambda$) is highly sensitive to the choice of step-size and thus requires careful tuning to maintain numerical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-08 Hwanwoo Kim , Dongkyu Derek Cho , Eric Laber

Linear TD($\lambda$) is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms for policy evaluation. Previously, convergence rates are typically established under the assumption of linearly independent features, which does not hold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

Reward specification is one of the most tricky problems in Reinforcement Learning, which usually requires tedious hand engineering in practice. One promising approach to tackle this challenge is to adopt existing expert video demonstrations…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Yuwei Fu , Haichao Zhang , Di Wu , Wei Xu , Benoit Boulet

We consider the problem of continuous-time policy evaluation. This consists in learning through observations the value function associated with an uncontrolled continuous-time stochastic dynamic and a reward function. We propose two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Ziad Kobeissi , Francis Bach

Variance reduction techniques have been successfully applied to temporal-difference (TD) learning and help to improve the sample complexity in policy evaluation. However, the existing work applied variance reduction to either the less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Shaocong Ma , Yi Zhou , Shaofeng Zou

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-03 Yann Ollivier

Long-horizon tasks, which have a large discount factor, pose a challenge for most conventional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Algorithms such as Value Iteration and Temporal Difference (TD) learning have a slow convergence rate and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Mark Bedaywi , Amin Rakhsha , Amir-massoud Farahmand

Dynamic Programming suffers from the curse of dimensionality due to large state and action spaces, a challenge further compounded by uncertainties in the environment. To mitigate these issue, we explore an off-policy based Temporal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-05 Ali Forootani , Raffaele Iervolino , Massimo Tipaldi , Mohammad Khosravi

Q-learning is a reliable but inefficient off-policy temporal-difference method, backing up reward only one step at a time. Replacing traces, using a recency heuristic, are more efficient but less reliable. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Mitchell Keith Bloch

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yitao Bai , Sihan Zeng , Justin Romberg , Thinh T. Doan

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