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Robot control using reinforcement learning has become popular, but its learning process generally terminates halfway through an episode for safety and time-saving reasons. This study addresses the problem of the most popular exception…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Taisuke Kobayashi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Blake Bordelon , Paul Masset , Henry Kuo , Cengiz Pehlevan

We propose a method for meta-learning reinforcement learning algorithms by searching over the space of computational graphs which compute the loss function for a value-based model-free RL agent to optimize. The learned algorithms are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 John D. Co-Reyes , Yingjie Miao , Daiyi Peng , Esteban Real , Sergey Levine , Quoc V. Le , Honglak Lee , Aleksandra Faust

Recent work shows that flow matching can be effective for scalar Q-value function estimation in reinforcement learning (RL), but it remains unclear why or how this approach differs from standard critics. Contrary to conventional belief, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Bhavya Agrawalla , Michal Nauman , Aviral Kumar

We propose a new approach to value function approximation which combines linear temporal difference reinforcement learning with subspace identification. In practical applications, reinforcement learning (RL) is complicated by the fact that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Byron Boots , Geoffrey J. Gordon

In this paper we argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-24 Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney , Rémi Munos

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this problem, a group of agents works cooperatively to evaluate the value function for the global discounted accumulative reward problem, which is composed of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

Inverse Reinforcement Learning infers a reward function from expert demonstrations, aiming to encode the behavior and intentions of the expert. Current approaches usually do this with generative and uni-modal models, meaning that they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Niklas Freymuth , Philipp Becker , Gerhard Neumann

A hallmark of modern large-scale machine learning techniques is the use of training objectives that provide dense supervision to intermediate computations, such as teacher forcing the next token in language models or denoising step-by-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Bhavya Agrawalla , Michal Nauman , Khush Agrawal , Aviral Kumar

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a cornerstone reinforcement learning (RL) method for policy evaluation, where the goal is to estimate the value function of a Markov decision process under a fixed policy. While a substantial body of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Donghwan Lee , Do Wan Kim

Linear TD($\lambda$) is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms for policy evaluation. Previously, convergence rates are typically established under the assumption of linearly independent features, which does not hold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-12-23 Karun Adusumilli , Dita Eckardt

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can model complex behavior policies for goal-directed sequential decision making tasks. A hallmark of RL algorithms is Temporal Difference (TD) learning: value function for the current state is moved towards a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Sahil Sharma , Girish Raguvir J , Srivatsan Ramesh , Balaraman Ravindran

In reinforcement learning, the TD($\lambda$) algorithm is a fundamental policy evaluation method with an efficient online implementation that is suitable for large-scale problems. One practical drawback of TD($\lambda$) is its sensitivity…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-12-23 Aviv Tamar , Panos Toulis , Shie Mannor , Edoardo M. Airoldi

Inverse reinforcement learning methods aim to retrieve the reward function of a Markov decision process based on a dataset of expert demonstrations. The commonplace scarcity and heterogeneous sources of such demonstrations can lead to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Ivan Ovinnikov , Eugene Bykovets , Joachim M. Buhmann

This paper develops an online inverse reinforcement learning algorithm aimed at efficiently recovering a reward function from ongoing observations of an agent's actions. To reduce the computation time and storage space in reward estimation,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-08-01 Kun Li , Joel W. Burdick

Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Marta Kwiatkowska , Yarin Gal

We study the use of randomized value functions to guide deep exploration in reinforcement learning. This offers an elegant means for synthesizing statistically and computationally efficient exploration with common practical approaches to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-25 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy , Daniel Russo , Zheng Wen

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is an imitation learning approach to learning reward functions from expert demonstrations. Its use avoids the difficult and tedious procedure of manual reward specification while retaining the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Daulet Baimukashev , Gokhan Alcan , Ville Kyrki

The predominant approach in reinforcement learning is to assign credit to actions based on the expected return. However, we show that the return may depend on the policy in a way which could lead to excessive variance in value estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Hsiao-Ru Pan , Nico Gürtler , Alexander Neitz , Bernhard Schölkopf