Related papers: Multi-Bellman operator for convergence of $Q$-lear…
Regularized Markov Decision Processes serve as models of sequential decision making under uncertainty wherein the decision maker has limited information processing capacity and/or aversion to model ambiguity. With functional approximation,…
Double Q-learning is a classical method for reducing overestimation bias, which is caused by taking maximum estimated values in the Bellman operation. Its variants in the deep Q-learning paradigm have shown great promise in producing…
Q-learning is widely used algorithm in reinforcement learning community. Under the lookup table setting, its convergence is well established. However, its behavior is known to be unstable with the linear function approximation case. This…
$Q$-learning is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms. It is widely believed that $Q$-learning with linear function approximation (i.e., linear $Q$-learning) suffers from possible divergence until the recent work…
It is well known that the extension of Watkins' algorithm to general function approximation settings is challenging: does the projected Bellman equation have a solution? If so, is the solution useful in the sense of generating a good…
The impact of softmax on the value function itself in reinforcement learning (RL) is often viewed as problematic because it leads to sub-optimal value (or Q) functions and interferes with the contraction properties of the Bellman operator.…
We study reinforcement learning methods with linear function approximation under non-Markov state and cost processes. We first consider the policy evaluation method and show that the algorithm converges under suitable ergodicity conditions…
We consider the problem of Approximate Dynamic Programming in relational domains. Inspired by the success of fitted Q-learning methods in propositional settings, we develop the first relational fitted Q-learning algorithms by representing…
In this study, we consider the application of max-plus-linear approximators for Q-function in offline reinforcement learning of discounted Markov decision processes. In particular, we incorporate these approximators to propose novel fitted…
Learning complicated value functions in high dimensional state space by function approximation is a challenging task, partially due to that the max-operator used in temporal difference updates can theoretically cause instability for most…
In recent work it is shown that Q-learning with linear function approximation is stable, in the sense of bounded parameter estimates, under the $(\varepsilon,\kappa)$-tamed Gibbs policy; $\kappa$ is inverse temperature, and $\varepsilon>0$…
The linear programming (LP) approach has a long history in the theory of approximate dynamic programming. When it comes to computation, however, the LP approach often suffers from poor scalability. In this work, we introduce a relaxed…
This paper reviews the topological groundwork for the study of reinforcement learning (RL) by focusing on the structure of state, action, and policy spaces. We begin by recalling key mathematical concepts such as complete metric spaces,…
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in analyzing the non-asymptotic behavior of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the performance of such algorithms in non-ideal environments, such as in the presence of…
Some approaches to solving challenging dynamic programming problems, such as Q-learning, begin by transforming the Bellman equation into an alternative functional equation, in order to open up a new line of attack. Our paper studies this…
The paper deals with a risk averse dynamic programming problem with infinite horizon. First, the required assumptions are formulated to have the problem well defined. Then the Bellman equation is derived, which may be also seen as a…
We prove performance guarantees of two algorithms for approximating $Q^\star$ in batch reinforcement learning. Compared to classical iterative methods such as Fitted Q-Iteration---whose performance loss incurs quadratic dependence on…
We develop a fixed-point extension of quantitative equational logic and give semantics in one-bounded complete quantitative algebras. Unlike previous related work about fixed-points in metric spaces, we are working with the notion of…
This paper introduces new optimality-preserving operators on Q-functions. We first describe an operator for tabular representations, the consistent Bellman operator, which incorporates a notion of local policy consistency. We show that this…
$Q$-learning with function approximation is one of the most empirically successful while theoretically mysterious reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, and was identified in Sutton (1999) as one of the most important theoretical open…