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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…

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…

Off-policy learning enables a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to reason counterfactually about policies that are not executed and is one of the most important ideas in RL. It, however, can lead to instability when combined with function…

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…

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental algorithm for estimating value functions in reinforcement learning. Recent finite-time analyses of TD with linear function approximation quantify its theoretical convergence rate. However,…

We consider the problem of reward learning for temporally extended tasks. For reward learning, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is a widely used paradigm. Given a Markov decision process (MDP) and a set of demonstrations for a task, IRL…

The task of predicting long-term patient outcomes using supervised machine learning is a challenging one, in part because of the high variance of each patient's trajectory, which can result in the model over-fitting to the training data.…

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…

Temporal difference (TD) learning is one of the main foundations of modern reinforcement learning. This paper studies the use of TD(0), a canonical TD algorithm, to estimate the value function of a given policy from a batch of data. In this…

In experimenting with off-policy temporal difference (TD) methods in hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) systems, we have observed unwanted on-policy learning under reproducible conditions. Here we present modifications to several TD…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…

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…

This paper investigates estimating the variance of a temporal-difference learning agent's update target. Most reinforcement learning methods use an estimate of the value function, which captures how good it is for the agent to be in a…

Reward specification is one of the most tricky problems in Reinforcement Learning, which usually requires tedious hand engineering in practice. One promising approach to tackle this challenge is to adopt existing expert video demonstrations…

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this problem, a group of agents works cooperatively to evaluate the value function for the global discounted accumulative reward problem, which is composed of…

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…

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…

We explore fixed-horizon temporal difference (TD) methods, reinforcement learning algorithms for a new kind of value function that predicts the sum of rewards over a $\textit{fixed}$ number of future time steps. To learn the value function…

In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large…