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Related papers: Target-Based Temporal Difference Learning

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The temporal difference (TD) error was first formalized in Sutton (1988), where it was first characterized as the difference between temporally successive predictions, and later, in that same work, formulated as the difference between a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Given a dataset on actions and resulting long-term rewards, a direct estimation approach fits value functions that minimize prediction error on the training data. Temporal difference learning (TD) methods instead fit value functions by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 David Cheikhi , Daniel Russo

We establish novel and general high-dimensional concentration inequalities and Berry-Esseen bounds for vector-valued martingales induced by Markov chains. We apply these results to analyze the performance of the Temporal Difference (TD)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-22 Weichen Wu , Yuting Wei , Alessandro Rinaldo

Multi-step temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it unifies one-step TD learning with Monte Carlo methods in a way where intermediate algorithms can outperform either extreme. They address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Kristopher De Asis , Richard S. Sutton

We devise a distributional variant of gradient temporal-difference (TD) learning. Distributional reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform the regular one in the recent study \citep{bellemare2017distributional}. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-04 Chao Qu , Shie Mannor , Huan Xu

The family of temporal difference (TD) methods span a spectrum from computationally frugal linear methods like TD({\lambda}) to data efficient least squares methods. Least square methods make the best use of available data directly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-13 Yangchen Pan , Adam White , Martha White

Off-policy reinforcement learning has many applications including: learning from demonstration, learning multiple goal seeking policies in parallel, and representing predictive knowledge. Recently there has been an proliferation of new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-01 Adam White , Martha White

We investigate the statistical properties of Temporal Difference (TD) learning with Polyak-Ruppert averaging, arguably one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement learning, for the task of estimating the parameters of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-25 Weichen Wu , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Alessandro Rinaldo

Temporal-difference (TD) learning is an important field in reinforcement learning. Sarsa and Q-Learning are among the most used TD algorithms. The Q($\sigma$) algorithm (Sutton and Barto (2017)) unifies both. This paper extends the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Markus Dumke

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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-14 Yang Peng , Kaicheng Jin , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

The hallmark feature of temporal-difference (TD) learning is bootstrapping: using value predictions to generate new value predictions. The vast majority of TD methods for control learn a policy by bootstrapping from a single action-value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Brett Daley , Prabhat Nagarajan , Martha White , Marlos C. Machado

Value functions arise as a component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in statistics and engineering applications. Computation of the associated Bellman equations is numerically challenging in all but a few special cases. A…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Adithya M. Devraj , Sean P. Meyn

In this paper, we provide a unified analysis of temporal difference learning algorithms with linear function approximators by exploiting their connections to Markov jump linear systems (MJLS). We tailor the MJLS theory developed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Bin Hu , Usman Ahmed Syed

We explore fixed-horizon temporal difference (TD) methods, reinforcement learning algorithms for a new kind of value function that predicts the sum of rewards over a $\textit{fixed}$ number of future time steps. To learn the value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-12 Kristopher De Asis , Alan Chan , Silviu Pitis , Richard S. Sutton , Daniel Graves

In this paper, we study the dynamics of temporal difference learning with neural network-based value function approximation over a general state space, namely, \emph{Neural TD learning}. We consider two practically used algorithms,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Semih Cayci , Siddhartha Satpathi , Niao He , R. Srikant

This paper introduces Q-learning with gradient target tracking, a novel reinforcement learning framework that provides a learned continuous target update mechanism as an alternative to the conventional hard update paradigm. In the standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Bum Geun Park , Taeho Lee , Donghwan Lee

Q-learning played a foundational role in the field reinforcement learning (RL). However, TD algorithms with off-policy data, such as Q-learning, or nonlinear function approximation like deep neural networks require several additional tricks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Matteo Gallici , Mattie Fellows , Benjamin Ellis , Bartomeu Pou , Ivan Masmitja , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster , Mario Martin

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

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