Related papers: TD Convergence: An Optimization Perspective
TD-learning is a foundation reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for value prediction. Critical to the accuracy of value predictions is the quality of state representations. In this work, we consider the question: how does end-to-end…
This is a companion note to our recent study of the weak convergence properties of constrained emphatic temporal-difference learning (ETD) algorithms from a theoretic perspective. It supplements the latter analysis with simulation results…
Temporal-difference (TD) learning is highly effective at controlling and evaluating an agent's long-term outcomes. Most approaches in this paradigm implement a semi-gradient update to boost the learning speed, which consists of ignoring the…
The use of target networks has been a popular and key component of recent deep Q-learning algorithms for reinforcement learning, yet little is known from the theory side. In this work, we introduce a new family of target-based temporal…
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) 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 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…
Many reinforcement learning approaches rely on temporal-difference (TD) learning to learn a critic. However, TD-learning updates can be high variance. Here, we introduce a model-based RL framework, Taylor TD, which reduces this variance in…
Multi-step temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it unifies one-step TD learning with Monte Carlo methods in a way where intermediate algorithms can outperform either extreme. They address…
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…
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…
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…
This paper analyzes multi-step temporal difference (TD)-learning algorithms within the ``deadly triad'' scenario, characterized by linear function approximation, off-policy learning, and bootstrapping. In particular, we prove that $n$-step…
We analyse quantile temporal-difference learning (QTD), a distributional reinforcement learning algorithm that has proven to be a key component in several successful large-scale applications of reinforcement learning. Despite these…
Emphatic Temporal Difference (ETD) learning has recently been proposed as a convergent off-policy learning method. ETD was proposed mainly to address convergence issues of conventional Temporal Difference (TD) learning under off-policy…
One of the most basic problems in reinforcement learning (RL) is policy evaluation: estimating the long-term return, i.e., value function, corresponding to a given fixed policy. The celebrated Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it combines ideas from dynamic programming and Monte Carlo methods in a way that allows for online and incremental model-free learning. A key idea of…
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…
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…
We consider the core reinforcement-learning problem of on-policy value function approximation from a batch of trajectory data, and focus on various issues of Temporal Difference (TD) learning and Monte Carlo (MC) policy evaluation. The two…