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Related papers: Recurrent Value Functions

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Standard regression techniques, while powerful, are often constrained by predefined, differentiable loss functions such as mean squared error. These functions may not fully capture the desired behavior of a system, especially when dealing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Yongchao Huang

Temporal difference methods enable efficient estimation of value functions in reinforcement learning in an incremental fashion, and are of broader interest because they correspond learning as observed in biological systems. Standard value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Brendan Bennett , Wesley Chung , Muhammad Zaheer , Vincent Liu

We propose world value functions (WVFs), a type of goal-oriented general value function that represents how to solve not just a given task, but any other goal-reaching task in an agent's environment. This is achieved by equipping an agent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Geraud Nangue Tasse , Benjamin Rosman , Steven James

Reinforcement learning is a general technique that allows an agent to learn an optimal policy and interact with an environment in sequential decision making problems. The goodness of a policy is measured by its value function starting from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-30 C. Shi , S. Zhang , W. Lu , R. Song

When using reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms it is common, given a large state space, to introduce some form of approximation architecture for the value function (VF). The exact form of this architecture can have a significant effect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Edward Barker , Charl Ras

Value functions are central to Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning but their exact estimation suffers from the curse of dimensionality, challenging the development of practical value-function (VF) estimation algorithms. Several…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Sergio Rozada , Victor Tenorio , Antonio G. Marques

We consider the problem of building a state representation model in a continual fashion. As the environment changes, the aim is to efficiently compress the sensory state's information without losing past knowledge. The learned features are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-12 Hugo Caselles-Dupré , Michael Garcia-Ortiz , David Filliat

This paper studies a recent proposal to use randomized value functions to drive exploration in reinforcement learning. These randomized value functions are generated by injecting random noise into the training data, making the approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Daniel Russo

In this paper, we combine task-dependent reward shaping and task-independent proto-value functions to obtain reward dependent proto-value functions (RPVFs). In constructing the RPVFs we are making use of the immediate rewards which are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-30 Chandrashekar Lakshmi Narayanan , Raj Kumar Maity , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen

Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

Efficient exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem commonly addressed through intrinsic rewards. Recent prominent approaches are based on state novelty or variants of artificial curiosity. However, directly applying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Aditya Ramesh , Louis Kirsch , Sjoerd van Steenkiste , Jürgen Schmidhuber

This paper investigates estimating the variance of a temporal-difference learning agent's update target. Most reinforcement learning methods use an estimate of the value function, which captures how good it is for the agent to be in a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-15 Craig Sherstan , Brendan Bennett , Kenny Young , Dylan R. Ashley , Adam White , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

In deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), value functions are typically approximated using deep neural networks and trained via mean squared error regression objectives to fit the true value functions. Recent research has proposed an alternative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Denis Tarasov , Kirill Brilliantov , Dmitrii Kharlapenko

In reinforcement learning, Return, which is the weighted accumulated future rewards, and Value, which is the expected return, serve as the objective that guides the learning of the policy. In classic RL, return is defined as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yufei Wang , Qiwei Ye , Tie-Yan Liu

Reward engineering has long been a challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research, as it often requires extensive human effort and iterative processes of trial-and-error to design effective reward functions. In this paper, we propose…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yufei Wang , Zhanyi Sun , Jesse Zhang , Zhou Xian , Erdem Biyik , David Held , Zackory Erickson

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is reward (mis)specification, whereby imprecisely defined reward functions can result in unintended, possibly harmful, behaviours. Indeed, reward functions in RL are typically treated as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Daniel Donnelly , Angelo Ferrando , Francesco Belardinelli

In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-01-04 Michael Fairbank , Eduardo Alonso

Attention-based sequential recommendation methods have shown promise in accurately capturing users' evolving interests from their past interactions. Recent research has also explored the integration of reinforcement learning (RL) into these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Melissa Mozifian , Tristan Sylvain , Dave Evans , Lili Meng

The selection of a reward function in Reinforcement Learning (RL) has garnered significant attention because of its impact on system performance. Issues of significant steady-state errors often manifest when quadratic reward functions are…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-02 Liyao Wang , Zishun Zheng , Yuan Lin