Related papers: Closing the gap between SVRG and TD-SVRG with Grad…

Value functions arise as a component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in statistics and engineering applications. Computation of the associated Bellman equations is numerically challenging in all but a few special cases. A…

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy's value function. TD($\lambda$), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction…

Value functions derived from Markov decision processes arise as a central component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in many statistics and engineering applications of machine learning techniques. Computation of the solution to…

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…

It is still common to use Q-learning and temporal difference (TD) learning-even though they have divergence issues and sound Gradient TD alternatives exist-because divergence seems rare and they typically perform well. However, recent work…

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…

In this paper, we study the Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear value function approximation. It is well known that most TD learning algorithms are unstable with linear function approximation and off-policy learning. Recent…

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)…

Off-policy algorithms, in which a behavior policy differs from the target policy and is used to gain experience for learning, have proven to be of great practical value in reinforcement learning. However, even for simple convex problems…

We study policy evaluation problems in multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) under a low-rank representation setting. In this setting, we are given $N$ learning tasks where the corresponding value function of these tasks lie in an…

Temporal difference (TD) methods constitute a class of methods for learning predictions in multi-step prediction problems, parameterized by a recency factor lambda. Currently the most important application of these methods is to temporal…

We propose a stochastic trust-region method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization that incorporates stochastic variance-reduced gradients (SVRG) to accelerate convergence. Unlike classical trust-region methods, the proposed algorithm…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a workhorse in machine learning, yet its slow convergence can be a computational bottleneck. Variance reduction techniques such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA have been proposed to overcome this weakness,…

Variance reduced stochastic gradient (SGD) methods converge significantly faster than the vanilla SGD counterpart. However, these methods are not very practical on large scale problems, as they either i) require frequent passes over the…

Variance reduction (VR) methods employ stochastic gradients with decreasing variance, and they have been widely applied to solve large-scale optimization problems in machine learning because of their efficiency. Existing theoretical studies…

Stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is a popular variance reduction technique for accelerating stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We provide a first analysis of the method for solving a class of linear inverse problems in the lens…

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…

We investigate the finite-time convergence properties of Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation, a cornerstone algorithm in the field of reinforcement learning. We are interested in the so-called ``robust''…

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference (TD) is the most direct algorithm to learn the value function of a policy. For large or infinite state spaces, exact representations of the value function are usually not available, and it must…

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…