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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Kristopher De Asis , Richard S. Sutton

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a cornerstone reinforcement learning (RL) method for policy evaluation, where the goal is to estimate the value function of a Markov decision process under a fixed policy. While a substantial body of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Donghwan Lee , Do Wan Kim

We study the multi-step off-policy learning approach to distributional RL. Despite the apparent similarity between value-based RL and distributional RL, our study reveals intriguing and fundamental differences between the two cases in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-18 Yunhao Tang , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Bernardo Ávila Pires , Will Dabney , Marc G. Bellemare

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) from pixel observations is notoriously unstable. As a result, many successful algorithms must combine different domain-specific practices and auxiliary losses to learn meaningful behaviors in complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Edoardo Cetin , Philip J. Ball , Steve Roberts , Oya Celiktutan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Shangtong Zhang , Shimon Whiteson

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental technique in reinforcement learning that updates value estimates for states or state-action pairs using a TD target. This target represents an improved estimate of the true value by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Wuhao Wang , Zhiyong Chen , Lepeng Zhang

Off-policy sampling and experience replay are key for improving sample efficiency and scaling model-free temporal difference learning methods. When combined with function approximation, such as neural networks, this combination is known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Ray Jiang , Shangtong Zhang , Veronica Chelu , Adam White , Hado van Hasselt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Nishanth Anand , Doina Precup

Traditional approaches in offline reinforcement learning aim to learn the optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative reward, also known as return. It is increasingly important to adjust the performance of AI agents to meet human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tsunehiko Tanaka , Kenshi Abe , Kaito Ariu , Tetsuro Morimura , Edgar Simo-Serra

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Sreejeet Maity , Aritra Mitra

Off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning with function approximation faces a structural tradeoff among stability, projection geometry, and variance control. Emphatic TD (ETD) improves the off-policy projection geometry through follow-on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xingguo Chen , Chaohui Wu , Jinguo Ye , Chao Li , Shangdong Yang , Guang Yang , Tianyu Liang , Wenhao Wang

Ensuring that reinforcement learning (RL) controllers satisfy safety and reliability constraints in real-world settings remains challenging: state-avoidance and constrained Markov decision processes often fail to capture trajectory-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Calin Belta , Ming C. Lin

Reinforcement learning (RL) tackles sequential decision-making problems by creating agents that interacts with their environment. However, existing algorithms often view these problem as static, focusing on point estimates for model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-21 Frank Shih , Faming Liang

A common optimization tool used in deep reinforcement learning is momentum, which consists in accumulating and discounting past gradients, reapplying them at each iteration. We argue that, unlike in supervised learning, momentum in Temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Emmanuel Bengio , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

One less addressed issue of deep reinforcement learning is the lack of generalization capability based on new state and new target, for complex tasks, it is necessary to give the correct strategy and evaluate all possible actions for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-16 Mincong Luo , Yin Tong , Jiachi Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Michele Garibbo , Maxime Robeyns , Laurence Aitchison

Experience replay enables off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) agents to utilize past experiences to maximize the cumulative reward. Prioritized experience replay that weighs experiences by the magnitude of their temporal-difference error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Ang A. Li , Zongqing Lu , Chenglin Miao

We consider emphatic temporal-difference learning algorithms for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes with finite spaces. Such algorithms were recently proposed by Sutton, Mahmood, and White (2015) as an improved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-29 Huizhen Yu

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a constraint satisfaction policy by interacting with the environment. We aim to tackle a more challenging problem: learning a safe policy from an offline dataset. We study the offline safe RL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Yihang Yao , Zhepeng Cen , Wenhao Yu , Tingnan Zhang , Ding Zhao

This paper considers the problem of solving constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems with anytime guarantees, meaning that the algorithmic solution must yield a constraint-satisfying policy at every iteration of its evolution. Our…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Pol Mestres , Arnau Marzabal , Jorge Cortés