Related papers: Reanalysis of Variance Reduced Temporal Difference…
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…
This work provides test error bounds for iterative fixed point methods on linear predictors -- specifically, stochastic and batch mirror descent (MD), and stochastic temporal difference learning (TD) -- with two core contributions: (a) a…
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…
The temporal-difference methods TD($\lambda$) and Sarsa($\lambda$) form a core part of modern reinforcement learning. Their appeal comes from their good performance, low computational cost, and their simple interpretation, given by their…
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…
This paper presents four different ways of looking at the well-known Least Squares Temporal Differences (LSTD) algorithm for computing the value function of a Markov Reward Process, each of them leading to different insights: the…
Variable importance is one of the most widely used measures for interpreting machine learning with significant interest from both statistics and machine learning communities. Recently, increasing attention has been directed toward…
This paper develops an unified framework to study finite-sample convergence guarantees of a large class of value-based asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. We do this by first reformulating the RL algorithms as…
Federated learning (FL) has recently gained much attention due to its effectiveness in speeding up supervised learning tasks under communication and privacy constraints. However, whether similar speedups can be established for reinforcement…
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.…
Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a standard and very successful reinforcement learning approach, at the core of both algorithms that learn the value of a given policy, as well as algorithms which learn how to improve policies.…
Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a standard and very successful reinforcement learning approach, at the core of both algorithms that learn the value of a given policy, as well as algorithms which learn how to improve policies.…
The task of predicting long-term patient outcomes using supervised machine learning is a challenging one, in part because of the high variance of each patient's trajectory, which can result in the model over-fitting to the training data.…
Estimating treatment effects, especially individualized treatment effects (ITE), using observational data is challenging due to the complex situations of confounding bias. Existing approaches for estimating treatment effects from…
In this paper we present the first empirical study of the emphatic temporal-difference learning algorithm (ETD), comparing it with conventional temporal-difference learning, in particular, with linear TD(0), on on-policy and off-policy…
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…
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…
Value function approximation is a crucial module for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning when the state space is large or continuous. The present paper takes a generative perspective on policy evaluation via temporal-difference (TD)…
Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation (linear TD) is a classic and powerful prediction algorithm in reinforcement learning. While it is well-understood that linear TD converges almost surely to a unique point,…
Building deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that find a good policy with few samples has proven notoriously challenging. To achieve sample efficiency, recent work has explored updating neural networks with large numbers of gradient…