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Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) focuses on designing policies that achieve good performance under model uncertainties. The goal is to maximize the worst-case long-term discounted reward, where the data for RL comes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Saptarshi Mandal , Yashaswini Murthy , R. Srikant

Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Andrew Jacobsen , Alan Chan

The convergence of many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with linear function approximation has been investigated extensively but most proofs assume that these methods converge to a unique solution. In this paper, we provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Marcus Hutter , Samuel Yang-Zhao , Sultan J. Majeed

We study the convergence behavior of the celebrated temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithm. By looking at the algorithm through the lens of optimization, we first argue that TD can be viewed as an iterative optimization algorithm where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Kavosh Asadi , Shoham Sabach , Yao Liu , Omer Gottesman , Rasool Fakoor

TD-learning is a foundation reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for value prediction. Critical to the accuracy of value predictions is the quality of state representations. In this work, we consider the question: how does end-to-end…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Yunhao Tang , Rémi Munos

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

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 learning and Residual Gradient methods are the most widely used temporal difference based learning algorithms; however, it has been shown that none of their objective functions is optimal w.r.t approximating the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-21 Bo Liu , Daoming Lyu , Wen Dong , Saad Biaz

Deep learning has exhibited remarkable results across diverse areas. To understand its success, substantial research has been directed towards its theoretical foundations. Nevertheless, the majority of these studies examine how well deep…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-11 Hao Liu , Jiahui Cheng , Wenjing Liao

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

Reinforcement learning is commonly used with function approximation. However, very few positive results are known about the convergence of function approximation based RL control algorithms. In this paper we show that TD(0) and Sarsa(0)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Istvan Szita , Andras Lorincz

Q-learning with neural network function approximation (neural Q-learning for short) is among the most prevalent deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Despite its empirical success, the non-asymptotic convergence rate of neural Q-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

Function approximation has been an indispensable component in modern reinforcement learning algorithms designed to tackle problems with large state spaces in high dimensions. This paper reviews recent results on error analysis for these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Jihao Long , Jiequn Han

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Sreejeet Maity , Aritra Mitra

Distances are pervasive in machine learning. They serve as similarity measures, loss functions, and learning targets; it is said that a good distance measure solves a task. When defining distances, the triangle inequality has proven to be a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-08 Silviu Pitis , Harris Chan , Kiarash Jamali , Jimmy Ba

In this paper, a Gauss-Newton Temporal Difference (GNTD) learning method is proposed to solve the Q-learning problem with nonlinear function approximation. In each iteration, our method takes one Gauss-Newton (GN) step to optimize a variant…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-02 Zhifa Ke , Junyu Zhang , Zaiwen Wen

Temporal-Difference learning (TD) [Sutton, 1988] with function approximation can converge to solutions that are worse than those obtained by Monte-Carlo regression, even in the simple case of on-policy evaluation. To increase our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Hugo Penedones , Damien Vincent , Hartmut Maennel , Sylvain Gelly , Timothy Mann , Andre Barreto

The goal of this paper is to investigate distributed temporal difference (TD) learning for a networked multi-agent Markov decision process. The proposed approach is based on distributed optimization algorithms, which can be interpreted as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

Many recent theoretical works on \emph{meta-learning} aim to achieve guarantees in leveraging similar representational structures from related tasks towards simplifying a target task. The main aim of theoretical guarantees on the subject is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-21 Dimitri Meunier , Zhu Li , Arthur Gretton , Samory Kpotufe

Approximation and learning of classifiers of large data sets by neural networks in terms of high-dimensional geometry and statistical learning theory are investigated. The influence of the VC dimension of sets of input-output functions of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Vera Kurkova , Marcello Sanguineti