Related papers: Policy Evaluation and Temporal-Difference Learning…
This paper analyzes multi-step temporal difference (TD)-learning algorithms within the ``deadly triad'' scenario, characterized by linear function approximation, off-policy learning, and bootstrapping. In particular, we prove that $n$-step…
We study a continuous-time portfolio optimization problem under an explicit constraint on the Deviation Conditional Value-at-Risk (DCVaR), defined as the difference between the CVaR and the expected terminal wealth. While the mean-CVaR…
Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to…
Recent non-asymptotic analyses have substantially advanced the theory of distributional policy evaluation, but they largely concern synchronous full-state updates under a generative model, model-based estimators, accelerated variants, or…
Variance reduction techniques have been successfully applied to temporal-difference (TD) learning and help to improve the sample complexity in policy evaluation. However, the existing work applied variance reduction to either the less…
We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…
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.…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a cornerstone of reinforcement learning. In the average-reward setting, standard TD($\lambda$) is highly sensitive to the choice of step-size and thus requires careful tuning to maintain numerical…
In traditional statistical learning, data points are usually assumed to be independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) following an unknown probability distribution. This paper presents a contrasting viewpoint, perceiving data points…
Long-horizon tasks, which have a large discount factor, pose a challenge for most conventional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Algorithms such as Value Iteration and Temporal Difference (TD) learning have a slow convergence rate and…
Robust reinforcement learning is essential for deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in real-world scenarios where environmental uncertainty predominates. Traditional robust reinforcement learning often depends on rectangularity…
Using a martingale concentration inequality, concentration bounds `from time $n_0$ on' are derived for stochastic approximation algorithms with contractive maps and both martingale difference and Markov noises. These are applied to…
Temporal-difference learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation. In this paper, we study the convergence of the regularized non-parametric TD(0) algorithm, in both the independent and Markovian observation settings. In particular,…
A basic simulation-based reinforcement learning algorithm is the Monte Carlo Exploring States (MCES) method, also known as optimistic policy iteration, in which the value function is approximated by simulated returns and a greedy policy is…
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…
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…
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…
This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal control policies for systems with uncertain dynamics and high-level control objectives specified as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Uncertainty is considered in the workspace…
Machine Learning models in real-world applications must continuously learn new tasks to adapt to shifts in the data-generating distribution. Yet, for Continual Learning (CL), models often struggle to balance learning new tasks (plasticity)…
This paper studies a discrete-time mean-variance model based on reinforcement learning. Compared with its continuous-time counterpart in \cite{zhou2020mv}, the discrete-time model makes more general assumptions about the asset's return…