Related papers: On the Statistical Benefits of Temporal Difference…

The family of temporal difference (TD) methods span a spectrum from computationally frugal linear methods like TD({\lambda}) to data efficient least squares methods. Least square methods make the best use of available data directly…

In this paper we present the first empirical study of the emphatic temporal-difference learning algorithm (ETD), comparing it with conventional temporal-difference learning, in particular, with linear TD(0), on on-policy and off-policy…

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…

We propose and analyze an alternate approach to off-policy multi-step temporal difference learning, in which off-policy returns are corrected with the current Q-function in terms of rewards, rather than with the target policy in terms of…

We consider the emphatic temporal-difference (TD) algorithm, ETD($\lambda$), for learning the value functions of stationary policies in a discounted, finite state and action Markov decision process. The ETD($\lambda$) algorithm was recently…

Recent work shows that flow matching can be effective for scalar Q-value function estimation in reinforcement learning (RL), but it remains unclear why or how this approach differs from standard critics. Contrary to conventional belief, we…

Estimating value functions is a core component of reinforcement learning algorithms. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms use bootstrapping, i.e. they update the value function toward a learning target using value estimates at…

We prove a non-asymptotic central limit theorem for vector-valued martingale differences using Stein's method, and use Poisson's equation to extend the result to functions of Markov Chains. We then show that these results can be applied to…

We devise a distributional variant of gradient temporal-difference (TD) learning. Distributional reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform the regular one in the recent study \citep{bellemare2017distributional}. In the…

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference-based algorithms can be sample-inefficient: for instance, with sparse rewards, no learning occurs until a reward is observed. This can be remedied by learning richer objects, such as a model of…

Emphatic Temporal Difference (ETD) learning has recently been proposed as a convergent off-policy learning method. ETD was proposed mainly to address convergence issues of conventional Temporal Difference (TD) learning under off-policy…

Long-horizon tasks, which have a large discount factor, pose a challenge for most conventional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Algorithms such as Value Iteration and Temporal Difference (TD) learning have a slow convergence rate and…

The true online TD({\lambda}) algorithm has recently been proposed (van Seijen and Sutton, 2014) as a universal replacement for the popular TD({\lambda}) algorithm, in temporal-difference learning and reinforcement learning. True online…

We derive an equation for temporal difference learning from statistical principles. Specifically, we start with the variational principle and then bootstrap to produce an updating rule for discounted state value estimates. The resulting…

Off-policy reinforcement learning has many applications including: learning from demonstration, learning multiple goal seeking policies in parallel, and representing predictive knowledge. Recently there has been an proliferation of new…

In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…

Temporal-difference learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation. In this paper, we study the convergence of the regularized non-parametric TD(0) algorithm, in both the independent and Markovian observation settings. In particular,…

We study the use of Temporal-Difference learning for estimating the structural parameters in dynamic discrete choice models. Our algorithms are based on the conditional choice probability approach but use functional approximations 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…

TD(0) is one of the most commonly used algorithms in reinforcement learning. Despite this, there is no existing finite sample analysis for TD(0) with function approximation, even for the linear case. Our work is the first to provide such…