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We propose a unified framework to study policy evaluation (PE) and the associated temporal difference (TD) methods for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space. We show that PE is equivalent to maintaining the martingale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental technique in reinforcement learning that updates value estimates for states or state-action pairs using a TD target. This target represents an improved estimate of the true value by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Wuhao Wang , Zhiyong Chen , Lepeng Zhang

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

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

Value functions derived from Markov decision processes arise as a central component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in many statistics and engineering applications of machine learning techniques. Computation of the solution to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Adithya M. Devraj , Ioannis Kontoyiannis , Sean P. Meyn

Temporal credit assignment in reinforcement learning is challenging due to delayed and stochastic outcomes. Monte Carlo targets can bridge long delays between action and consequence but lead to high-variance targets due to stochasticity.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Aditya A. Ramesh , Kenny Young , Louis Kirsch , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Temporal difference (TD) learning is often used to update the estimate of the value function which is used by RL agents to extract useful policies. In this paper, we focus on value function estimation in continual reinforcement learning. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Nishanth Anand , Doina Precup

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

In this paper we introduce the idea of improving the performance of parametric temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithms by selectively emphasizing or de-emphasizing their updates on different time steps. In particular, we show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-21 Richard S. Sutton , A. Rupam Mahmood , Martha White

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

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

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Kaicheng Jin , Yang Peng , Jiansheng Yang , Zhihua Zhang

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

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

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

Motivated by the emerging use of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in engineering applications such as networked robotics, swarming drones, and sensor networks, we investigate the policy evaluation problem in a fully decentralized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-31 Jun Sun , Gang Wang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Qinmin Yang , Zaiyue Yang

Reinforcement learning has attracted great attention recently, especially policy gradient algorithms, which have been demonstrated on challenging decision making and control tasks. In this paper, we propose an active multi-step TD algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Gang Chen , Dingcheng Li , Ran Xu

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

We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model. We establish both asymptotic and non-asymptotic versions of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-17 Koulik Khamaru , Ashwin Pananjady , Feng Ruan , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

Temporal difference learning with linear function approximation is a popular method to obtain a low-dimensional approximation of the value function of a policy in a Markov Decision Process. We give a new interpretation of this method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Rui Liu , Alex Olshevsky