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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

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms that learn policies by trial-and-error must learn from limited amounts of data collected by actively interacting with the environment. While many prior works have shown that proper regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Qiyang Li , Aviral Kumar , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Adithya M. Devraj , Ioannis Kontoyiannis , Sean P. Meyn

While deep reinforcement learning excels at solving tasks where large amounts of data can be collected through virtually unlimited interaction with the environment, learning from limited interaction remains a key challenge. We posit that an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Max Schwarzer , Ankesh Anand , Rishab Goel , R Devon Hjelm , Aaron Courville , Philip Bachman

Experience replay enables off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) agents to utilize past experiences to maximize the cumulative reward. Prioritized experience replay that weighs experiences by the magnitude of their temporal-difference error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Ang A. Li , Zongqing Lu , Chenglin Miao

We study the problem of temporal-difference-based policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. In particular, we analyse the use of a distributional reinforcement learning algorithm, quantile temporal-difference learning (QTD), for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Mark Rowland , Yunhao Tang , Clare Lyle , Rémi Munos , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Bhavya Agrawalla , Michal Nauman , Aviral Kumar

In recent years, the successor representation (SR) has attracted increasing attention in reinforcement learning (RL), and it has been used to address some of its key challenges, such as exploration, credit assignment, and generalization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hon Tik Tse , Siddarth Chandrasekar , Marlos C. Machado

Recent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) successes rely on end-to-end learning from fixed-size observational inputs (e.g. image, state-variables). However, many challenging and interesting problems in decision making involve observations or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Vince Jankovics , Michael Garcia Ortiz , Eduardo Alonso

Scaling end-to-end reinforcement learning to control real robots from vision presents a series of challenges, in particular in terms of sample efficiency. Against end-to-end learning, state representation learning can help learn a compact,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Antonin Raffin , Ashley Hill , René Traoré , Timothée Lesort , Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez , David Filliat

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Kaicheng Jin , Yang Peng , Jiansheng Yang , Zhihua Zhang

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 2020-06-17 Mingde Zhao

In real-world applications with large state and action spaces, reinforcement learning (RL) typically employs function approximations to represent core components like the policies, value functions, and dynamics models. Although powerful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Chenxiao Gao , Haotian Sun , Na Li , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Machine learning approaches to spatiotemporal physical systems have primarily focused on next-frame prediction, with the goal of learning an accurate emulator for the system's evolution in time. However, these emulators are computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Helen Qu , Rudy Morel , Michael McCabe , Alberto Bietti , François Lanusse , Shirley Ho , Yann LeCun

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

Future reward estimation is a core component of reinforcement learning agents; i.e., Q-value and state-value functions, predicting an agent's sum of future rewards. Their scalar output, however, obfuscates when or what individual future…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Mark Towers , Yali Du , Christopher Freeman , Timothy J. Norman

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

We propose a new approach to value function approximation which combines linear temporal difference reinforcement learning with subspace identification. In practical applications, reinforcement learning (RL) is complicated by the fact that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Byron Boots , Geoffrey J. Gordon

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

In reinforcement learning an agent interacts with the environment by taking actions and observing the next state and reward. When sampled probabilistically, these state transitions, rewards, and actions can all induce randomness in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-30 Will Dabney , Mark Rowland , Marc G. Bellemare , Rémi Munos