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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Rohan Deb , Meet Gandhi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

General Value Functions (GVFs) (Sutton et al., 2011) represent predictive knowledge in reinforcement learning. Each GVF computes the expected return for a given policy, based on a unique reward. Existing methods relying on fixed behavior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Arushi Jain , Josiah P. Hanna , Doina Precup

Value-based methods for reinforcement learning lack generally applicable ways to derive behavior from a value function. Many approaches involve approximate value iteration (e.g., $Q$-learning), and acting greedily with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-27 Alan Chan , Kris de Asis , Richard S. Sutton

Credible forecasting and representation learning of dynamical systems are of ever-increasing importance for reliable decision-making. To that end, we propose a family of Gaussian processes (GP) for dynamical systems with linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Petar Bevanda , Max Beier , Armin Lederer , Alexandre Capone , Stefan Sosnowski , Sandra Hirche

We propose Fractional Policy Gradients (FPG), a reinforcement learning framework incorporating fractional calculus for long-term temporal modeling in policy optimization. Standard policy gradient approaches face limitations from Markovian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Urvi Pawar , Kunal Telangi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Brett Daley , Prabhat Nagarajan , Martha White , Marlos C. Machado

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has recently shown strong performance in post-training large language models and vision-language models. It raises a question of whether the GRPO also significantly promotes the test-time adaptation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Yujun Li , Hongyuan Zhang , Yuan Yuan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Yifei Min , Tianhao Wang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a principled post-training paradigm for Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) due to its on-policy optimization, yet existing GRPO-based methods remain fundamentally constrained by sparse reward signals and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Jiaze Li , Hao Yin , Haoran Xu , Boshen Xu , Wenhui Tan , Zewen He , Jianzhong Ju , Zhenbo Luo , Jian Luan

We initiate the study of federated reinforcement learning under environmental heterogeneity by considering a policy evaluation problem. Our setup involves $N$ agents interacting with environments that share the same state and action space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Han Wang , Aritra Mitra , Hamed Hassani , George J. Pappas , James Anderson

We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning in discounted Markov decision processes, where the goal is to evaluate a policy in a model-free way by using observations of a state process generated without executing the policy. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Huizhen Yu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Richard S. Sutton

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a widely used method to evaluate policies in reinforcement learning. While many TD learning methods have been developed in recent years, little attention has been paid to preserving privacy and most of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-26 Canzhe Zhao , Yanjie Ze , Jing Dong , Baoxiang Wang , Shuai Li

Gradient descent or its variants are popular in training neural networks. However, in deep Q-learning with neural network approximation, a type of reinforcement learning, gradient descent (also known as Residual Gradient (RG)) is barely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Shuyu Yin , Tao Luo , Peilin Liu , Zhi-Qin John Xu

Projection-based model reduction is among the most widely adopted methods for constructing parametric Reduced-Order Models (ROM). Utilizing the snapshot data from solving full-order governing equations, the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-16 Xiao Liu , Jingyi Feng , Xinchao Liu

On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Wenkai Yang , Weijie Liu , Ruobing Xie , Kai Yang , Saiyong Yang , Yankai Lin

Multi-step temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it unifies one-step TD learning with Monte Carlo methods in a way where intermediate algorithms can outperform either extreme. They address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Kristopher De Asis , Richard S. Sutton

The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haoxing Tian , Zaiwei Chen , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

Neural Temporal Difference (TD) Learning is an approximate temporal difference method for policy evaluation that uses a neural network for function approximation. Analysis of Neural TD Learning has proven to be challenging. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Haoxing Tian , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Kaicheng Jin , Yang Peng , Jiansheng Yang , Zhihua Zhang