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Off-policy learning ability is an important feature of reinforcement learning (RL) for practical applications. However, even one of the most elementary RL algorithms, temporal-difference (TD) learning, is known to suffer form divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

The average reward is a fundamental performance metric in reinforcement learning (RL) focusing on the long-run performance of an agent. Differential temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms are a major advance for average reward RL as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ethan Blaser , Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang

Emphatic temporal difference (ETD) learning (Sutton et al., 2016) is a successful method to conduct the off-policy value function evaluation with function approximation. Although ETD has been shown to converge asymptotically to a desirable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-18 Ziwei Guan , Tengyu Xu , Yingbin Liang

Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Kaige Yang

We propose and analyze an alternate approach to off-policy multi-step temporal difference learning, in which off-policy returns are corrected with the current Q-function in terms of rewards, rather than with the target policy in terms of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-08-12 Anna Harutyunyan , Marc G. Bellemare , Tom Stepleton , Remi Munos

Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms provide a data-driven way to acquire policies that quickly adapt to many tasks with varying rewards or dynamics functions. However, learned meta-policies are often effective only on the exact task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Anurag Ajay , Abhishek Gupta , Dibya Ghosh , Sergey Levine , Pulkit Agrawal

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

Since the earliest days of reinforcement learning, the workhorse method for assigning credit to actions over time has been temporal-difference (TD) learning, which propagates credit backward timestep-by-timestep. This approach suffers when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-25 David Raposo , Sam Ritter , Adam Santoro , Greg Wayne , Theophane Weber , Matt Botvinick , Hado van Hasselt , Francis Song

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,…

Temporal difference (TD) learning is one of the main foundations of modern reinforcement learning. This paper studies the use of TD(0), a canonical TD algorithm, to estimate the value function of a given policy from a batch of data. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Brahma Pavse , Ishan Durugkar , Josiah Hanna , Peter Stone

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-04 Xiang Gu , Sina Ghiassian , Richard S. Sutton

Meta-learning stands for 'learning to learn' such that generalization to new tasks is achieved. Among these methods, Gradient-based meta-learning algorithms are a specific sub-class that excel at quick adaptation to new tasks with limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Jathushan Rajasegaran , Salman Khan , Munawar Hayat , Fahad Shahbaz Khan , Mubarak Shah

TD($\lambda$) with function approximation has proved empirically successful for some complex reinforcement learning problems. For linear approximation, TD($\lambda$) has been shown to minimise the squared error between the approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Lex Weaver , Jonathan Baxter

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Off-policy reinforcement learning with eligibility traces is challenging because of the discrepancy between target policy and behavior policy. One common approach is to measure the difference between two policies in a probabilistic way,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-20 Longxiang Shi , Shijian Li , Longbing Cao , Long Yang , Gang Pan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Claas A Voelcker , Marcel Hussing , Eric Eaton , Amir-massoud Farahmand , Igor Gilitschenski

In experimenting with off-policy temporal difference (TD) methods in hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) systems, we have observed unwanted on-policy learning under reproducible conditions. Here we present modifications to several TD…

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

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,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-12 Tao Sun , Han Shen , Tianyi Chen , Dongsheng Li

The task of predicting long-term patient outcomes using supervised machine learning is a challenging one, in part because of the high variance of each patient's trajectory, which can result in the model over-fitting to the training data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Thomas Frost , Kezhi Li , Steve Harris

We study the problem of temporal-difference-based policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. In particular, we analyse the use of a distributional reinforcement learning algorithm, quantile temporal-difference learning (QTD), for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Mark Rowland , Yunhao Tang , Clare Lyle , Rémi Munos , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney