Related papers: Why Target Networks Stabilise Temporal Difference …
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.…
Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms with neural network function parameterization have well-established empirical success in many practical large-scale reinforcement learning tasks. However, theoretical understanding of these…
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…
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly deep neural networks, have pushed the boundaries of what is achievable in complex tasks. Traditional methods for training neural networks in classification problems often rely on…
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…
We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…
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…
The use of target networks in deep reinforcement learning is a widely popular solution to mitigate the brittleness of semi-gradient approaches and stabilize learning. However, target networks notoriously require additional memory and delay…
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…
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…
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…
In this paper we introduce the idea of improving the performance of parametric temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithms by selectively emphasizing or de-emphasizing their updates on different time steps. In particular, we show that…
We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the…
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…
The average reward is a fundamental performance metric in reinforcement learning (RL) focusing on the long-run performance of an agent. Differential temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms are a major advance for average reward RL as…
Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…
Policy evaluation algorithms are essential to reinforcement learning due to their ability to predict the performance of a policy. However, there are two long-standing issues lying in this prediction problem that need to be tackled:…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a cornerstone of reinforcement learning. In the average-reward setting, standard TD($\lambda$) is highly sensitive to the choice of step-size and thus requires careful tuning to maintain numerical…
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…
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…