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Estimating value functions is a core component of reinforcement learning algorithms. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms use bootstrapping, i.e. they update the value function toward a learning target using value estimates at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Anthony GX-Chen , Veronica Chelu , Blake A. Richards , Joelle Pineau

Emphatic temporal difference (ETD) learning (Sutton et al., 2016) is a successful method to conduct the off-policy value function evaluation with function approximation. Although ETD has been shown to converge asymptotically to a desirable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-18 Ziwei Guan , Tengyu Xu , Yingbin Liang

Multi-step temporal-difference (TD) learning, where the update targets contain information from multiple time steps ahead, is one of the most popular forms of TD learning for linear function approximation. The reason is that multi-step…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-08-19 Harm van Seijen

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Thomas Frost , Kezhi Li , Steve Harris

A common optimization tool used in deep reinforcement learning is momentum, which consists in accumulating and discounting past gradients, reapplying them at each iteration. We argue that, unlike in supervised learning, momentum in Temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Emmanuel Bengio , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

Emphatic Temporal Difference (ETD) learning has recently been proposed as a convergent off-policy learning method. ETD was proposed mainly to address convergence issues of conventional Temporal Difference (TD) learning under off-policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-04 Xiang Gu , Sina Ghiassian , Richard S. Sutton

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

Transfer Learning (TL) has shown great potential to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) by leveraging prior knowledge from past learned policies of relevant tasks. Existing transfer approaches either explicitly computes the similarity…

Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms provide a data-driven way to acquire policies that quickly adapt to many tasks with varying rewards or dynamics functions. However, learned meta-policies are often effective only on the exact task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Anurag Ajay , Abhishek Gupta , Dibya Ghosh , Sergey Levine , Pulkit Agrawal

This paper revisits the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm for the policy evaluation tasks in reinforcement learning. Typically, the performance of TD(0) and TD($\lambda$) is very sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Oftentimes,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-12 Tao Sun , Han Shen , Tianyi Chen , Dongsheng Li

Off-policy reinforcement learning has many applications including: learning from demonstration, learning multiple goal seeking policies in parallel, and representing predictive knowledge. Recently there has been an proliferation of new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-01 Adam White , Martha White

Off-policy reinforcement learning with eligibility traces is challenging because of the discrepancy between target policy and behavior policy. One common approach is to measure the difference between two policies in a probabilistic way,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-20 Longxiang Shi , Shijian Li , Longbing Cao , Long Yang , Gang Pan

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

We study how a Reinforcement Learning (RL) system can remain sample-efficient when learning from an imperfect model of the environment. This is particularly challenging when the learning system is resource-constrained and in continual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Bradley Burega , John D. Martin , Luke Kapeluck , Michael Bowling

Predictions and predictive knowledge have seen recent success in improving not only robot control but also other applications ranging from industrial process control to rehabilitation. A property that makes these predictive approaches well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Johannes Günther , Nadia M. Ady , Alex Kearney , Michael R. Dawson , Patrick M. Pilarski

This paper investigates estimating the variance of a temporal-difference learning agent's update target. Most reinforcement learning methods use an estimate of the value function, which captures how good it is for the agent to be in a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-15 Craig Sherstan , Brendan Bennett , Kenny Young , Dylan R. Ashley , Adam White , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

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

A central capability of intelligent systems is the ability to continuously build upon previous experiences to speed up and enhance learning of new tasks. Two distinct research paradigms have studied this question. Meta-learning views this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-05 Chelsea Finn , Aravind Rajeswaran , Sham Kakade , Sergey Levine

The process of meta-learning algorithms from data, instead of relying on manual design, is growing in popularity as a paradigm for improving the performance of machine learning systems. Meta-learning shows particular promise for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Alexander David Goldie , Zilin Wang , Jaron Cohen , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster , Shimon Whiteson

Differential temporal difference (TD) methods are value-based reinforcement learning algorithms that have been proposed for infinite-horizon problems. They rely on reward centering, where each reward is centered by the average reward. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Kris De Asis , Mohamed Elsayed , Jiamin He