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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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2008-02-03 P. Cichosz

Temporal difference learning and Residual Gradient methods are the most widely used temporal difference based learning algorithms; however, it has been shown that none of their objective functions is optimal w.r.t approximating the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-21 Bo Liu , Daoming Lyu , Wen Dong , Saad Biaz

Temporal difference (TD) learning is one of the main foundations of modern reinforcement learning. This paper studies the use of TD(0), a canonical TD algorithm, to estimate the value function of a given policy from a batch of data. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Brahma Pavse , Ishan Durugkar , Josiah Hanna , Peter Stone

Data-driven model predictive control has two key advantages over model-free methods: a potential for improved sample efficiency through model learning, and better performance as computational budget for planning increases. However, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Nicklas Hansen , Xiaolong Wang , Hao Su

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Thomas Frost , Kezhi Li , Steve Harris

We consider the problem of continuous-time policy evaluation. This consists in learning through observations the value function associated with an uncontrolled continuous-time stochastic dynamic and a reward function. We propose two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Ziad Kobeissi , Francis Bach

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

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-14 Yang Peng , Kaicheng Jin , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

Temporal difference (TD) learning is often used to update the estimate of the value function which is used by RL agents to extract useful policies. In this paper, we focus on value function estimation in continual reinforcement learning. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Nishanth Anand , Doina Precup

Differential temporal difference (TD) methods are value-based reinforcement learning algorithms that have been proposed for infinite-horizon problems. They rely on reward centering, where each reward is centered by the average reward. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Kris De Asis , Mohamed Elsayed , Jiamin He

We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model. We establish both asymptotic and non-asymptotic versions of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-17 Koulik Khamaru , Ashwin Pananjady , Feng Ruan , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

Relative temporal-difference (TD) learning was introduced to mitigate the slow convergence of TD methods when the discount factor approaches one by subtracting a baseline from the temporal-difference update. While this idea has been studied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Masoud S. Sakha , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar , Sean Meyn

This paper investigates estimating the variance of a temporal-difference learning agent's update target. Most reinforcement learning methods use an estimate of the value function, which captures how good it is for the agent to be in a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-15 Craig Sherstan , Brendan Bennett , Kenny Young , Dylan R. Ashley , Adam White , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Temporal difference methods enable efficient estimation of value functions in reinforcement learning in an incremental fashion, and are of broader interest because they correspond learning as observed in biological systems. Standard value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Brendan Bennett , Wesley Chung , Muhammad Zaheer , Vincent Liu

In this paper we consider the problem of obtaining sharp bounds for the performance of temporal difference (TD) methods with linear function approximation for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes. We show that a simple…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-18 Sergey Samsonov , Daniil Tiapkin , Alexey Naumov , Eric Moulines

Motivated by the emerging use of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in engineering applications such as networked robotics, swarming drones, and sensor networks, we investigate the policy evaluation problem in a fully decentralized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-31 Jun Sun , Gang Wang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Qinmin Yang , Zaiyue Yang

In this paper, we provide a unified analysis of temporal difference learning algorithms with linear function approximators by exploiting their connections to Markov jump linear systems (MJLS). We tailor the MJLS theory developed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Bin Hu , Usman Ahmed Syed

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

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-29 Donghwan Lee , Jianghai Hu

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

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a standard and very successful reinforcement learning approach, at the core of both algorithms that learn the value of a given policy, as well as algorithms which learn how to improve policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Mingde Zhao , Sitao Luan , Ian Porada , Xiao-Wen Chang , Doina Precup