English
Related papers

Related papers: The Nature of Temporal Difference Errors in Multi-…

200 papers

We present a unifying framework for designing and analysing distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms in terms of recursively estimating statistics of the return distribution. Our key insight is that DRL algorithms can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-22 Mark Rowland , Robert Dadashi , Saurabh Kumar , Rémi Munos , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney

The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement learning (RL)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-23 Donghwan Lee , Hyungjin Yoon , Naira Hovakimyan

In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mastane Achab , Gergely Neu

In reinforcement learning an agent interacts with the environment by taking actions and observing the next state and reward. When sampled probabilistically, these state transitions, rewards, and actions can all induce randomness in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-30 Will Dabney , Mark Rowland , Marc G. Bellemare , Rémi Munos

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-26 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a general and very useful tool for estimating the value function of a given policy, which in turn is required to find good policies. Generally speaking, TD learning updates states whenever they are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Nishanth Anand , Doina Precup

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms that learn policies by trial-and-error must learn from limited amounts of data collected by actively interacting with the environment. While many prior works have shown that proper regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Qiyang Li , Aviral Kumar , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-07 Jalaj Bhandari , Daniel Russo , Raghav Singal

The goal of an offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm is to learn optimal polices using historical (offline) data, without access to the environment for online exploration. One of the main challenges in offline RL is the distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Kishan Panaganti , Zaiyan Xu , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a very active research area. However, several technical and scientific issues require to be addressed, amongst which we can mention data inefficiency, exploration-exploitation trade-off, and multi-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Mohammad Reza Samsami , Hossein Alimadad

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

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has considerably advanced over the past decade. At the same time, state-of-the-art RL algorithms require a large computational budget in terms of training time to converge. Recent work has started to…

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful, general tool for learning complex behaviors. However, its sample efficiency is often impractically large for solving challenging real-world problems, even with off-policy algorithms such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Vitchyr Pong , Shixiang Gu , Murtaza Dalal , Sergey Levine

In a broad class of reinforcement learning applications, stochastic rewards have heavy-tailed distributions, which lead to infinite second-order moments for stochastic (semi)gradients in policy evaluation and direct policy optimization. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

Temporal-Difference learning (TD) [Sutton, 1988] with function approximation can converge to solutions that are worse than those obtained by Monte-Carlo regression, even in the simple case of on-policy evaluation. To increase our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Hugo Penedones , Damien Vincent , Hartmut Maennel , Sylvain Gelly , Timothy Mann , Andre Barreto

Aligning generative diffusion models with human preferences via reinforcement learning (RL) is critical yet challenging. Most existing algorithms are often vulnerable to reward hacking, such as quality degradation, over-stylization, or…

When performing imitation learning from expert demonstrations, distribution matching is a popular approach, in which one alternates between estimating distribution ratios and then using these ratios as rewards in a standard reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Ilya Kostrikov , Ofir Nachum , Jonathan Tompson

In many finite horizon episodic reinforcement learning (RL) settings, it is desirable to optimize for the undiscounted return - in settings like Atari, for instance, the goal is to collect the most points while staying alive in the long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Joshua Romoff , Peter Henderson , Ahmed Touati , Emma Brunskill , Joelle Pineau , Yann Ollivier

Off-policy learning enables a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to reason counterfactually about policies that are not executed and is one of the most important ideas in RL. It, however, can lead to instability when combined with function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Xiaochi Qian , Shangtong Zhang