Related papers: Temporal-difference learning with nonlinear functi…
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…
Despite the wide applications of Adam in reinforcement learning (RL), the theoretical convergence of Adam-type RL algorithms has not been established. This paper provides the first such convergence analysis for two fundamental RL algorithms…
Despite the widespread empirical success of ResNet, the generalization properties of deep ResNet are rarely explored beyond the lazy training regime. In this work, we investigate \emph{scaled} ResNet in the limit of infinitely deep and wide…
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…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it combines ideas from dynamic programming and Monte Carlo methods in a way that allows for online and incremental model-free learning. A key idea of…
We prove a non-asymptotic central limit theorem for vector-valued martingale differences using Stein's method, and use Poisson's equation to extend the result to functions of Markov Chains. We then show that these results can be applied to…
We study the use of Temporal-Difference learning for estimating the structural parameters in dynamic discrete choice models. Our algorithms are based on the conditional choice probability approach but use functional approximations to…
One of the main obstacles to broad application of reinforcement learning methods is the parameter sensitivity of our core learning algorithms. In many large-scale applications, online computation and function approximation represent key…
The commonly used Reinforcement Learning (RL) model, MDPs (Markov Decision Processes), has a basic premise that rewards depend on the current state and action only. However, many real-world tasks are non-Markovian, which has long-term…
Reinforcement learning has been successful across several applications in which agents have to learn to act in environments with sparse feedback. However, despite this empirical success there is still a lack of theoretical understanding of…
We study the finite-time behaviour of the popular temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm when combined with tail-averaging. We derive finite time bounds on the parameter error of the tail-averaged TD iterate under a step-size choice…
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…
We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on an entropic risk measure in episodic non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs). Both the reward functions and the state transition kernels are unknown and allowed to vary…
We provide non-asymptotic bounds for the well-known temporal difference learning algorithm TD(0) with linear function approximators. These include high-probability bounds as well as bounds in expectation. Our analysis suggests that a…
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…
Learning in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) takes place by minimizing a non-convex high-dimensional loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategy. The learning process is observed to be able to find good minimizers…
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…
We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…
How much does a trained RL policy actually use its past observations? We propose \emph{Temporal Range}, a model-agnostic metric that treats first-order sensitivities of multiple vector outputs across a temporal window to the input sequence…
One of the most basic problems in reinforcement learning (RL) is policy evaluation: estimating the long-term return, i.e., value function, corresponding to a given fixed policy. The celebrated Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm…