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Related papers: TD Convergence: An Optimization Perspective

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The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haoxing Tian , Zaiwei Chen , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

This paper gives specific divergence examples of value-iteration for several major Reinforcement Learning and Adaptive Dynamic Programming algorithms, when using a function approximator for the value function. These divergence examples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-31 Michael Fairbank , Eduardo Alonso

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

TD(0) is one of the most commonly used algorithms in reinforcement learning. Despite this, there is no existing finite sample analysis for TD(0) with function approximation, even for the linear case. Our work is the first to provide such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-12 Gal Dalal , Balázs Szörényi , Gugan Thoppe , Shie Mannor

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Huizhen Yu

Temporal-difference (TD) learning is widely regarded as one of the most popular algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its widespread use, it has only been recently that researchers have begun to actively study its finite time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for a class of multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal-difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-29 Donghwan Lee , Jianghai Hu

Temporal-difference learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation. In this paper, we study the convergence of the regularized non-parametric TD(0) algorithm, in both the independent and Markovian observation settings. In particular,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-25 Eloïse Berthier , Ziad Kobeissi , Francis Bach

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Taisuke Kobayashi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang

Recent research endeavours have theoretically shown the beneficial effect of cooperation in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). In a setting involving $N$ agents, this beneficial effect usually comes in the form of an $N$-fold linear…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Nicolò Dal Fabbro , Arman Adibi , Aritra Mitra , George J. Pappas

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

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) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

We initiate the study of federated reinforcement learning under environmental heterogeneity by considering a policy evaluation problem. Our setup involves $N$ agents interacting with environments that share the same state and action space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Han Wang , Aritra Mitra , Hamed Hassani , George J. Pappas , James Anderson

Emotions are intimately tied to motivation and the adaptation of behavior, and many animal species show evidence of emotions in their behavior. Therefore, emotions must be related to powerful mechanisms that aid survival, and, emotions must…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Joost Broekens

Balancing between computational efficiency and sample efficiency is an important goal in reinforcement learning. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms stochastically update the value function, with a linear time complexity in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-21 Clement Gehring , Yangchen Pan , Martha White

It is still common to use Q-learning and temporal difference (TD) learning-even though they have divergence issues and sound Gradient TD alternatives exist-because divergence seems rare and they typically perform well. However, recent work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-21 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Shivam Garg , Dhawal Gupta , Adam White , Martha White

We propose a method for meta-learning reinforcement learning algorithms by searching over the space of computational graphs which compute the loss function for a value-based model-free RL agent to optimize. The learned algorithms are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 John D. Co-Reyes , Yingjie Miao , Daiyi Peng , Esteban Real , Sergey Levine , Quoc V. Le , Honglak Lee , Aleksandra Faust

Reinforcement learning has been applied to many interesting problems such as the famous TD-gammon and the inverted helicopter flight. However, little effort has been put into developing methods to learn policies for complex persistent tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-22 Xiao Li , Calin Belta