Related papers: The Mean-Squared Error of Double Q-Learning
Although Q-learning is one of the most successful algorithms for finding the best action-value function (and thus the optimal policy) in reinforcement learning, its implementation often suffers from large overestimation of Q-function values…
We revisit the unified two-timescale Q-learning algorithm as initially introduced by Angiuli et al. \cite{angiuli2022unified}. This algorithm demonstrates efficacy in solving mean field game (MFG) and mean field control (MFC) problems,…
Q-learning is a stochastic approximation version of the classic value iteration. The literature has established that Q-learning suffers from both maximization bias and slower convergence. Recently, multi-step algorithms have shown practical…
Deep Q-Learning is an important reinforcement learning algorithm, which involves training a deep neural network, called Deep Q-Network (DQN), to approximate the well-known Q-function. Although wildly successful under laboratory conditions,…
In Reinforcement Learning the Q-learning algorithm provably converges to the optimal solution. However, as others have demonstrated, Q-learning can also overestimate the values and thereby spend too long exploring unhelpful states. Double…
Double Q-learning is a classical method for reducing overestimation bias, which is caused by taking maximum estimated values in the Bellman operation. Its variants in the deep Q-learning paradigm have shown great promise in producing…
An improvement of Q-learning is proposed in this paper. It is different from classic Q-learning in that the similarity between different states and actions is considered in the proposed method. During the training, a new updating mechanism…
The Q-learning algorithm is known to be affected by the maximization bias, i.e. the systematic overestimation of action values, an important issue that has recently received renewed attention. Double Q-learning has been proposed as an…
We present two approaches for linear prediction of long-memory time series. The first approach consists in truncating the Wiener-Kolmogorov predictor by restricting the observations to the last $k$ terms, which are the only available values…
Many machine learning and optimization algorithms can be cast as instances of stochastic approximation (SA). The convergence rate of these algorithms is known to be slow, with the optimal mean squared error (MSE) of order $O(n^{-1})$. In…
$Q$-learning is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Despite its widespread success in various applications, it is prone to overestimation bias in the $Q$-learning update. To address this issue, double…
The optimistic nature of the Q-learning target leads to an overestimation bias, which is an inherent problem associated with standard $Q-$learning. Such a bias fails to account for the possibility of low returns, particularly in risky…
Motivated by the widespread use of temporal-difference (TD-) and Q-learning algorithms in reinforcement learning, this paper studies a class of biased stochastic approximation (SA) procedures under a mild "ergodic-like" assumption on the…
The quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) is a popular tool for analyzing dyadic data in medical and social sciences. To test the association between two dyadic measurements represented by two symmetric matrices, QAP calculates the p-value…
The $Q$-learning algorithm is a simple and widely-used stochastic approximation scheme for reinforcement learning, but the basic protocol can exhibit instability in conjunction with function approximation. Such instability can be observed…
$Q$-learning is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms. It is widely believed that $Q$-learning with linear function approximation (i.e., linear $Q$-learning) suffers from possible divergence until the recent work…
Nested-error regression models are widely used for analyzing clustered data. For example, they are often applied to two-stage sample surveys, and in biology and econometrics. Prediction is usually the main goal of such analyses, and…
The popular Q-learning algorithm is known to overestimate action values under certain conditions. It was not previously known whether, in practice, such overestimations are common, whether they harm performance, and whether they can…
Q-learning is a fundamental algorithmic primitive in reinforcement learning. This paper develops a new framework for analyzing Q-learning from a switching-system viewpoint. In particular, we derive a direct stochastic switching-system…
The use of target networks is a common practice in deep reinforcement learning for stabilizing the training; however, theoretical understanding of this technique is still limited. In this paper, we study the so-called periodic Q-learning…