English
Related papers

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

200 papers

This paper revisits the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm for the policy evaluation tasks in reinforcement learning. Typically, the performance of TD(0) and TD($\lambda$) is very sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Oftentimes,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-12 Tao Sun , Han Shen , Tianyi Chen , Dongsheng Li

Many reinforcement learning approaches rely on temporal-difference (TD) learning to learn a critic. However, TD-learning updates can be high variance. Here, we introduce a model-based RL framework, Taylor TD, which reduces this variance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Michele Garibbo , Maxime Robeyns , Laurence Aitchison

Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

This paper aims to solve a safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with risk measure-based constraints. As risk measures, such as conditional value at risk (CVaR), focus on the tail distribution of cost signals, constraining risk measures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Dohyeong Kim , Songhwai Oh

A common optimization tool used in deep reinforcement learning is momentum, which consists in accumulating and discounting past gradients, reapplying them at each iteration. We argue that, unlike in supervised learning, momentum in Temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Emmanuel Bengio , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

We study deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with delayed rewards. In many real-world tasks, instant rewards are often not readily accessible or even defined immediately after the agent performs actions. In this work, we first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Beining Han , Zhizhou Ren , Zuofan Wu , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Temporal-difference (TD) methods learn state and action values efficiently by bootstrapping from their own future value predictions, but such a self-bootstrapping mechanism is prone to bootstrapping bias, where the errors in the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Qiyang Li , Seohong Park , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous state-action spaces remains challenging in scientific computing due to poor sample efficiency and lack of pathwise physical consistency. We introduce Differential Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Minh Nguyen , Chandrajit Bajaj

Reinforcement learning (RL) tackles sequential decision-making problems by creating agents that interacts with their environment. However, existing algorithms often view these problem as static, focusing on point estimates for model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-21 Frank Shih , Faming Liang

In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Hongyuan Zha

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns policies from fixed datasets without online interactions, but suffers from distribution shift, causing inaccurate evaluation and overestimation of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xuyang Chen , Keyu Yan , Wenhan Cao , Lin Zhao

In reinforcement learning (RL), temporal difference (TD) errors are widely adopted for optimizing value and policy functions. However, since the TD error is defined by a bootstrap method, its computation tends to be noisy and destabilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Taisuke Kobayashi

Multi-step (also called n-step) methods in reinforcement learning (RL) have been shown to be more efficient than the 1-step method due to faster propagation of the reward signal, both theoretically and empirically, in tasks exploiting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Lingheng Meng , Rob Gorbet , Dana Kulić

The recently proposed distributional approach to reinforcement learning (DiRL) is centered on learning the distribution of the reward-to-go, often referred to as the value distribution. In this work, we show that the distributional Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Dror Freirich , Ron Meir , Aviv Tamar

Offline reinforcement learning aims to utilize datasets of previously gathered environment-action interaction records to learn a policy without access to the real environment. Recent work has shown that offline reinforcement learning can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan , Vaneet Aggarwal

We reinterpret and propose a framework for pricing path-dependent financial derivatives by estimating the full distribution of payoffs using Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DistRL). Unlike traditional methods that focus on expected…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-07-18 Ahmet Umur Özsoy

In reinforcement learning, the TD($\lambda$) algorithm is a fundamental policy evaluation method with an efficient online implementation that is suitable for large-scale problems. One practical drawback of TD($\lambda$) is its sensitivity…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-12-23 Aviv Tamar , Panos Toulis , Shie Mannor , Edoardo M. Airoldi

We analyse quantile temporal-difference learning (QTD), a distributional reinforcement learning algorithm that has proven to be a key component in several successful large-scale applications of reinforcement learning. Despite these…

Recently, robust reinforcement learning (RL) methods against input observation have garnered significant attention and undergone rapid evolution due to RL's potential vulnerability. Although these advanced methods have achieved reasonable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Kosuke Nakanishi , Akihiro Kubo , Yuji Yasui , Shin Ishii

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Minheng Xiao , Xian Yu , Lei Ying