Related papers: Finite-Time Analysis of Temporal Difference Learni…
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…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of an operator using noisy samples and widely used in optimization and Reinforcement Learning (RL). The noise in RL exhibits a Markovian structure, and in…
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…
This paper studies the exponential stability of random matrix products driven by a general (possibly unbounded) state space Markov chain. It is a cornerstone in the analysis of stochastic algorithms in machine learning (e.g. for parameter…
We investigate the statistical properties of Temporal Difference (TD) learning with Polyak-Ruppert averaging, arguably one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement learning, for the task of estimating the parameters of the…
In this paper, we consider the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and derive exact closed-form formulas for the finite-time mean-squared estimation errors of decentralized temporal difference (TD)…
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…
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 is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, but the vanilla TD can substantially suffer from the inherent optimization variance. A variance reduced TD (VRTD) algorithm was…
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…
The focus of this paper is on stochastic variational inequalities (VI) under Markovian noise. A prominent application of our algorithmic developments is the stochastic policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning. Prior…
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…
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…
This paper develops an unified framework to study finite-sample convergence guarantees of a large class of value-based asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. We do this by first reformulating the RL algorithms as…
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…
Given a dataset on actions and resulting long-term rewards, a direct estimation approach fits value functions that minimize prediction error on the training data. Temporal difference learning (TD) methods instead fit value functions by…
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…
In this paper, we study the dynamics of temporal difference learning with neural network-based value function approximation over a general state space, namely, \emph{Neural TD learning}. We consider two practically used algorithms,…
In reinforcement learning (RL), temporal difference (TD) errors are widely adopted for optimizing value and policy functions. However, since the TD error is defined by a bootstrap method, its computation tends to be noisy and destabilize…
Value functions arise as a component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in statistics and engineering applications. Computation of the associated Bellman equations is numerically challenging in all but a few special cases. A…