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In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Bo Liu , Ian Gemp , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Ji Liu , Sridhar Mahadevan , Marek Petrik

In reinforcement learning episodes, the rewards and punishments are often non-deterministic, and there are invariably stochastic elements governing the underlying situation. Such stochastic elements are often numerous and cannot be known in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Nikki Lijing Kuang , Clement H. C. Leung , Vienne W. K. Sung

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

Learning from rewards (i.e., reinforcement learning or RL) and learning to imitate a teacher (i.e., teacher-student learning) are two established approaches for solving sequential decision-making problems. To combine the benefits of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Idan Shenfeld , Zhang-Wei Hong , Aviv Tamar , Pulkit Agrawal

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-11 Gaia Molinaro , Anne G. E. Collins

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have traditionally been tasked with maximizing the value function of a Markov decision process (MDP), either in continuous settings, with fixed discount factor $\gamma < 1$, or in episodic settings, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-11 Silviu Pitis

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved significant success in solving single-goal tasks. However, uniform goal selection often results in sample inefficiency in multi-goal settings where agents must learn a universal goal-conditioned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles in real-world tasks with high-dimensional state spaces and long horizons, where sparse or fixed rewards severely slow down exploration and cause agents to get trapped in local optima. This paper…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Hürkan Şahin , Van Huyen Dang , Erdi Sayar , Alper Yegenoglu , Erdal Kayacan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Yunhao Tang , Rémi Munos

We consider the Reinforcement Learning problem of controlling an unknown dynamical system to maximise the long-term average reward along a single trajectory. Most of the literature considers system interactions that occur in discrete time…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-07 Lorenzo Croissant , Marc Abeille , Bruno Bouchard

This thesis explores how deep learning models learn over time, using ideas inspired by force analysis. Specifically, we zoom in on the model's training procedure to see how one training example affects another during learning, like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Yi Ren

Recent work in reinforcement learning has leveraged symmetries in the model to improve sample efficiency in training a policy. A commonly used simplifying assumption is that the dynamics and reward both exhibit the same symmetry; however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Yasin Sonmez , Neelay Junnarkar , Murat Arcak

The problem of sample complexity of online reinforcement learning is often studied in the literature without taking into account any partial knowledge about the system dynamics that could potentially accelerate the learning process. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Meshal Alharbi , Mardavij Roozbehani , Munther Dahleh

Applying reinforcement learning to robotic systems poses a number of challenging problems. A key requirement is the ability to handle continuous state and action spaces while remaining within a limited time and resource budget.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Benjamin van Niekerk , Andreas Damianou , Benjamin Rosman

Sequential decision making in the presence of uncertainty and stochastic dynamics gives rise to distributions over state/action trajectories in reinforcement learning (RL) and optimal control problems. This observation has led to a variety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Jad Rahme , Ryan P. Adams

In this work, we introduce a learning model designed to meet the needs of applications in which computational resources are limited, and robustness and interpretability are prioritized. Learning problems can be formulated as constrained…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-26 Christos Mavridis , John Baras

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

In the first part of this paper, we consider a family of continuous-time dynamical systems coupled with diffusion-transmutation processes. Under certain conditions, such randomly perturbed dynamical systems can be interpreted as an averaged…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-21 Getachew K. Befekadu

We introduce a weakly supervised method for representation learning based on aligning temporal sequences (e.g., videos) of the same process (e.g., human action). The main idea is to use the global temporal ordering of latent correspondences…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Isma Hadji , Konstantinos G. Derpanis , Allan D. Jepson