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We introduce a generalization of temporal-difference (TD) learning to networks of interrelated predictions. Rather than relating a single prediction to itself at a later time, as in conventional TD methods, a TD network relates each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-04-22 Richard S. Sutton , Brian Tanner

It is still common to use Q-learning and temporal difference (TD) learning-even though they have divergence issues and sound Gradient TD alternatives exist-because divergence seems rare and they typically perform well. However, recent work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-21 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Shivam Garg , Dhawal Gupta , Adam White , Martha White

Integral to recent successes in deep reinforcement learning has been a class of temporal difference methods that use infrequently updated target values for policy evaluation in a Markov Decision Process. Yet a complete theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Mattie Fellows , Matthew J. A. Smith , Shimon Whiteson

We investigate the finite-time convergence properties of Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation, a cornerstone algorithm in the field of reinforcement learning. We are interested in the so-called ``robust''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Wei-Cheng Lee , Francesco Orabona

Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Ray Jiang , Tom Zahavy , Zhongwen Xu , Adam White , Matteo Hessel , Charles Blundell , Hado van Hasselt

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

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a policy evaluation in reinforcement learning whose performance can be enhanced by variance reduction methods. Recently, multiple works have sought to fuse TD learning with Stochastic Variance Reduced…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Arsenii Mustafin , Alex Olshevsky , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

In this paper, we formalize the almost sure convergence of $Q$-learning and linear temporal difference (TD) learning with Markovian samples using the Lean 4 theorem prover based on the Mathlib library. $Q$-learning and linear TD are among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Shangtong Zhang

The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for a class of multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal-difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-29 Donghwan Lee , Jianghai Hu

Temporal difference (TD) methods constitute a class of methods for learning predictions in multi-step prediction problems, parameterized by a recency factor lambda. Currently the most important application of these methods is to temporal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2008-02-03 P. Cichosz

In large-scale distributed machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Aritra Mitra , George J. Pappas , Hamed Hassani

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved empirical success in various domains. One core task in DRL is distributional policy evaluation, which involves estimating the return distribution $\eta^\pi$ for a given policy $\pi$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-17 Yang Peng , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

Deep neural networks' remarkable ability to correctly fit training data when optimized by gradient-based algorithms is yet to be fully understood. Recent theoretical results explain the convergence for ReLU networks that are wider than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Asaf Noy , Yi Xu , Yonathan Aflalo , Lihi Zelnik-Manor , Rong Jin

Gradient-based meta-learning (GBML) with deep neural nets (DNNs) has become a popular approach for few-shot learning. However, due to the non-convexity of DNNs and the bi-level optimization in GBML, the theoretical properties of GBML with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Haoxiang Wang , Ruoyu Sun , Bo Li

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

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

Because reinforcement learning suffers from a lack of scalability, online value (and Q-) function approximation has received increasing interest this last decade. This contribution introduces a novel approximation scheme, namely the Kalman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-06-13 Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

The empirical emergence of neural collapse -- a surprising symmetry in the feature representations of the training data in the penultimate layer of deep neural networks -- has spurred a line of theoretical research aimed at its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Peter Súkeník , Christoph H. Lampert , Marco Mondelli

Non-Markovian dynamics are commonly found in real-world environments due to long-range dependencies, partial observability, and memory effects. The Bellman equation that is the central pillar of Reinforcement learning (RL) becomes only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Zuyuan Zhang , Sizhe Tang , Tian Lan

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown great success in many machine learning tasks. Their training is challenging since the loss surface of the network architecture is generally non-convex, or even non-smooth. How and under what…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-09 Lam M. Nguyen , Trang H. Tran , Marten van Dijk