Related papers: Synthetic Returns for Long-Term Credit Assignment
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…
While deep reinforcement learning excels at solving tasks where large amounts of data can be collected through virtually unlimited interaction with the environment, learning from limited interaction remains a key challenge. We posit that an…
TD-learning is a foundation reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for value prediction. Critical to the accuracy of value predictions is the quality of state representations. In this work, we consider the question: how does end-to-end…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental technique in reinforcement learning that updates value estimates for states or state-action pairs using a TD target. This target represents an improved estimate of the true value by…
Reinforcement learning agents learn by encouraging behaviours which maximize their total reward, usually provided by the environment. In many environments, however, the reward is provided after a series of actions rather than each single…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging in the common case of delays between events and their sensory perceptions. State-of-the-art (SOTA) state augmentation techniques either suffer from state space explosion or performance degeneration…
The effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) depends on an animal's ability to assign credit for rewards to the appropriate preceding stimuli. One aspect of understanding the neural underpinnings of this process involves understanding…
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.…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) based methods have seen their paramount successes in solving serial decision-making and control problems in recent years. For conventional RL formulations, Markov Decision Process (MDP) and state-action-value…
In numerous episodic reinforcement learning (RL) environments, SARSA-based methodologies are employed to enhance policies aimed at maximizing returns over long horizons. Traditional SARSA algorithms face challenges in achieving an optimal…
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…
In this work we describe a novel deep reinforcement learning architecture that allows multiple actions to be selected at every time-step in an efficient manner. Multi-action policies allow complex behaviours to be learnt that would…
The hallmark feature of temporal-difference (TD) learning is bootstrapping: using value predictions to generate new value predictions. The vast majority of TD methods for control learn a policy by bootstrapping from a single action-value…
Temporal-difference (TD) learning is highly effective at controlling and evaluating an agent's long-term outcomes. Most approaches in this paradigm implement a semi-gradient update to boost the learning speed, which consists of ignoring the…
Credit assignmen, disentangling each agent's contribution to a shared reward, is a critical challenge in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). To be effective, credit assignment methods must preserve the environment's…
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.…
Recent work in deep reinforcement learning has allowed algorithms to learn complex tasks such as Atari 2600 games just from the reward provided by the game, but these algorithms presently require millions of training steps in order to…
We present a computational framework for synthesis of distributed control strategies for a heterogeneous team of robots in a partially observable environment. The goal is to cooperatively satisfy specifications given as Truncated Linear…
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.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on sparse, outcome-level rewards -- yet determining which actions within a long trajectory caused the outcome remains difficult. This credit assignment (CA)…