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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ethan Blaser , Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables an intelligent agent to optimise its performance in a task by continuously taking action from an observed state and receiving a feedback from the environment in form of rewards. RL typically uses tables…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Alberto Castagna

Reinforcement learning is concerned with identifying reward-maximizing behaviour policies in environments that are initially unknown. State-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches, such as deep Q-networks, are model-free and learn to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-18 Felix Leibfried , Nate Kushman , Katja Hofmann

Reinforcement learning is able to solve complex sequential decision-making tasks but is currently limited by sample efficiency and required computation. To improve sample efficiency, recent work focuses on model-based RL which interleaves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Yi Zhao , Wenshuai Zhao , Rinu Boney , Juho Kannala , Joni Pajarinen

In reinforcement learning, state representations are used to tractably deal with large problem spaces. State representations serve both to approximate the value function with few parameters, but also to generalize to newly encountered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-02 Charline Le Lan , Stephen Tu , Adam Oberman , Rishabh Agarwal , Marc G. Bellemare

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-03 Yann Ollivier

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) environments, whether in robotics or industrial settings, often involve non-visual observations and require not only efficient but also reliable and thus interpretable and flexible RL approaches. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Moritz Lange , Noah Krystiniak , Raphael C. Engelhardt , Wolfgang Konen , Laurenz Wiskott

Learning to locomote is one of the most common tasks in physics-based animation and deep reinforcement learning (RL). A learned policy is the product of the problem to be solved, as embodied by the RL environment, and the RL algorithm.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Daniele Reda , Tianxin Tao , Michiel van de Panne

In the landscape of Recommender System (RS) applications, reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a powerful tool, primarily due to its proficiency in optimizing long-term rewards. Nevertheless, it suffers from instability in…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ziru Liu , Shuchang Liu , Zijian Zhang , Qingpeng Cai , Xiangyu Zhao , Kesen Zhao , Lantao Hu , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai

In reinforcement learning, Return, which is the weighted accumulated future rewards, and Value, which is the expected return, serve as the objective that guides the learning of the policy. In classic RL, return is defined as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yufei Wang , Qiwei Ye , Tie-Yan Liu

We present a novel $l_1$ regularized off-policy convergent TD-learning method (termed RO-TD), which is able to learn sparse representations of value functions with low computational complexity. The algorithmic framework underlying RO-TD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Bo Liu , Sridhar Mahadevan , Ji Liu

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

This paper studies the continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) for optimal switching problems across multiple regimes. We consider a type of exploratory formulation under entropy regularization where the agent randomizes both the timing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Yijie Huang , Mengge Li , Xiang Yu , Zhou Zhou

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 argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-24 Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney , Rémi Munos

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-16 Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Jason D. Lee , Zhaoran Wang

In large-scale distributed machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Aritra Mitra , George J. Pappas , Hamed Hassani

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental algorithm for estimating value functions in reinforcement learning. Recent finite-time analyses of TD with linear function approximation quantify its theoretical convergence rate. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yunxiang Li , Mark Schmidt , Reza Babanezhad , Sharan Vaswani

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

Deep reinforcement learning includes a broad family of algorithms that parameterise an internal representation, such as a value function or policy, by a deep neural network. Each algorithm optimises its parameters with respect to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Zhongwen Xu , Hado van Hasselt , Matteo Hessel , Junhyuk Oh , Satinder Singh , David Silver