Related papers: Finite-Time Analysis of Temporal Difference Learni…
We consider online reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition function and stochastic rewards drawn from some fixed but unknown distribution. The learner aims to learn the optimal policy and…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with linear function approximation under drifting environment. Specifically, both the reward and state transition functions can evolve over time but their…
One of the fundamental challenges associated with reinforcement learning (RL) is that collecting sufficient data can be both time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we formalize a concept of time reversal symmetry in a Markov decision…
The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…
We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning methods for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes with finite spaces and discounted reward criteria, and we present a collection of convergence results for several…
Q-learning is known as one of the fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Its convergence has been the focus of extensive research over the past several decades. Recently, a new finitetime error bound and analysis for Q-learning…
Emphatic Temporal Difference (TD) methods are a class of off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods involving the use of followon traces. Despite the theoretical success of emphatic TD methods in addressing the notorious deadly triad of…
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…
The finite-time convergence of off-policy TD learning has been comprehensively studied recently. However, such a type of convergence has not been well established for off-policy TD learning in the multi-agent setting, which covers broader…
Q-learning has long been one of the most popular reinforcement learning algorithms, and theoretical analysis of Q-learning has been an active research topic for decades. Although researches on asymptotic convergence analysis of Q-learning…
The goal of this paper is to investigate distributed temporal difference (TD) learning for a networked multi-agent Markov decision process. The proposed approach is based on distributed optimization algorithms, which can be interpreted as…
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.…
Learning the value function of a given policy from data samples is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning. TD($\lambda$) is a popular class of algorithms to solve this problem. However, the weights assigned to different $n$-step…
In this paper, we propose a multi-timescale replay (MTR) buffer for improving continual learning in RL agents faced with environments that are changing continuously over time at timescales that are unknown to the agent. The basic MTR buffer…
Multi-step temporal-difference (TD) learning, where the update targets contain information from multiple time steps ahead, is one of the most popular forms of TD learning for linear function approximation. The reason is that multi-step…
A computational problem in biological reward-based learning is how credit assignment is performed in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Much research suggests that NAc dopamine encodes temporal-difference (TD) errors for learning value…
Randomized experiments (a.k.a. A/B tests) are a powerful tool for estimating treatment effects, to inform decisions making in business, healthcare and other applications. In many problems, the treatment has a lasting effect that evolves…
This paper presents four different ways of looking at the well-known Least Squares Temporal Differences (LSTD) algorithm for computing the value function of a Markov Reward Process, each of them leading to different insights: the…
Stochastic time-varying optimization is an integral part of learning in which the shape of the function changes over time in a non-deterministic manner. This paper considers multiple models of stochastic time variation and analyzes the…
We study the link between generalization and interference in temporal-difference (TD) learning. Interference is defined as the inner product of two different gradients, representing their alignment. This quantity emerges as being of…