Related papers: Baird Counterexample is Solved: with an example of…
Given a dataset on actions and resulting long-term rewards, a direct estimation approach fits value functions that minimize prediction error on the training data. Temporal difference learning (TD) methods instead fit value functions by…
In this paper we provide a rigorous convergence analysis of a "off"-policy temporal difference learning algorithm with linear function approximation and per time-step linear computational complexity in "online" learning environment. The…
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…
Using insight from numerical approximation of ODEs and the problem formulation and solution methodology of TD learning through a Galerkin relaxation, I propose a new class of TD learning algorithms. After applying the improved numerical…
Gradient descent or its variants are popular in training neural networks. However, in deep Q-learning with neural network approximation, a type of reinforcement learning, gradient descent (also known as Residual Gradient (RG)) is barely…
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…
In this paper, we study the Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear value function approximation. It is well known that most TD learning algorithms are unstable with linear function approximation and off-policy learning. Recent…
Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy's value function. TD($\lambda$), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction…
Adam is shown not being able to converge to the optimal solution in certain cases. Researchers recently propose several algorithms to avoid the issue of non-convergence of Adam, but their efficiency turns out to be unsatisfactory in…
With the fast development of deep learning, it has become common to learn big neural networks using massive training data. Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (ASGD) is widely adopted to fulfill this task for its efficiency, which is,…
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…
Deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples, posing critical security challenges in real-world applications. While Adversarial Training (AT ) is a widely adopted defense mechanism to enhance robustness, it often incurs a…
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…
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…
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…
This work proposes a time-efficient Natural Gradient Descent method, called TENGraD, with linear convergence guarantees. Computing the inverse of the neural network's Fisher information matrix is expensive in NGD because the Fisher matrix…
In this report we consider the following problem: Given a trained model that is partially faulty, can we correct its behaviour without having to train the model from scratch? In other words, can we ``debug" neural networks similar to how we…
Adam is one of the most influential adaptive stochastic algorithms for training deep neural networks, which has been pointed out to be divergent even in the simple convex setting via a few simple counterexamples. Many attempts, such as…
We study the finite-time behaviour of the popular temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm when combined with tail-averaging. We derive finite time bounds on the parameter error of the tail-averaged TD iterate under a step-size choice…
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…