English
Related papers

Related papers: Finite-Time Performance of Distributed Temporal Di…

200 papers

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy's value function. TD($\lambda$), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Jianfei Ma

The focus of this paper is on stochastic variational inequalities (VI) under Markovian noise. A prominent application of our algorithmic developments is the stochastic policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning. Prior…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-17 Georgios Kotsalis , Guanghui Lan , Tianjiao Li

We consider the core reinforcement-learning problem of on-policy value function approximation from a batch of trajectory data, and focus on various issues of Temporal Difference (TD) learning and Monte Carlo (MC) policy evaluation. The two…

Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms with neural network function parameterization have well-established empirical success in many practical large-scale reinforcement learning tasks. However, theoretical understanding of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Zhifa Ke , Zaiwen Wen , Junyu Zhang

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

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

In reinforcement learning (RL) , one of the key components is policy evaluation, which aims to estimate the value function (i.e., expected long-term accumulated reward) of a policy. With a good policy evaluation method, the RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Yue Wang , Wei Chen , Yuting Liu , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

In this paper, we consider the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and derive exact closed-form formulas for the finite-time mean-squared estimation errors of decentralized temporal difference (TD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Xingang Guo , Bin Hu

Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

We study personalized multi-agent average reward TD learning, in which a collection of agents interacts with different environments and jointly learns their respective value functions. We focus on the setting where there exists a shared…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su

The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haoxing Tian , Zaiwei Chen , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning methods for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes with finite spaces and discounted reward criteria, and we present a collection of convergence results for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Huizhen Yu

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, but the vanilla TD can substantially suffer from the inherent optimization variance. A variance reduced TD (VRTD) algorithm was…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang

Motivated by broad applications in reinforcement learning and federated learning, we study local stochastic approximation over a network of agents, where their goal is to find the root of an operator composed of the local operators at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Thinh T. Doan

Learning the value function of a given policy from data samples is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning. TD($\lambda$) is a popular class of algorithms to solve this problem. However, the weights assigned to different $n$-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Rohan Deb , Meet Gandhi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Balancing between computational efficiency and sample efficiency is an important goal in reinforcement learning. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms stochastically update the value function, with a linear time complexity in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-21 Clement Gehring , Yangchen Pan , Martha White

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) over directed communication networks, where agents cooperate with each other to explore an unknown environment and accomplish a specific task. We propose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-07 Haocheng Yang , Shengchao Zhao , Yongchao Liu

The goal of this manuscript is to conduct a controltheoretic analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithms. TD-learning serves as a cornerstone in the realm of reinforcement learning, offering a methodology for approximating the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Donghwan Lee , Do Wan Kim

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yitao Bai , Sihan Zeng , Justin Romberg , Thinh T. Doan

We present a method to find an optimal policy with respect to a reward function for a discounted Markov decision process under general linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications. Previous work has either focused on maximizing a cumulative…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-24 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo