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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Caleb Bowyer

We investigate the finite-time convergence properties of Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation, a cornerstone algorithm in the field of reinforcement learning. We are interested in the so-called ``robust''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Wei-Cheng Lee , Francesco Orabona

Temporal-difference (TD) networks are a class of predictive state representations that use well-established TD methods to learn models of partially observable dynamical systems. Previous research with TD networks has dealt only with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Christopher M. Vigorito

We study the convergence behavior of the celebrated temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithm. By looking at the algorithm through the lens of optimization, we first argue that TD can be viewed as an iterative optimization algorithm where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Kavosh Asadi , Shoham Sabach , Yao Liu , Omer Gottesman , Rasool Fakoor

Temporal-Difference learning (TD) [Sutton, 1988] with function approximation can converge to solutions that are worse than those obtained by Monte-Carlo regression, even in the simple case of on-policy evaluation. To increase our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Hugo Penedones , Damien Vincent , Hartmut Maennel , Sylvain Gelly , Timothy Mann , Andre Barreto

Temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it combines ideas from dynamic programming and Monte Carlo methods in a way that allows for online and incremental model-free learning. A key idea of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-21 Kristopher De Asis , Brendan Bennett , Richard S. Sutton

Off-policy learning ability is an important feature of reinforcement learning (RL) for practical applications. However, even one of the most elementary RL algorithms, temporal-difference (TD) learning, is known to suffer form divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

We introduce a generalization of temporal-difference (TD) learning to networks of interrelated predictions. Rather than relating a single prediction to itself at a later time, as in conventional TD methods, a TD network relates each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-04-22 Richard S. Sutton , Brian Tanner

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a policy evaluation in reinforcement learning whose performance can be enhanced by variance reduction methods. Recently, multiple works have sought to fuse TD learning with Stochastic Variance Reduced…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Arsenii Mustafin , Alex Olshevsky , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

Relative temporal-difference (TD) learning was introduced to mitigate the slow convergence of TD methods when the discount factor approaches one by subtracting a baseline from the temporal-difference update. While this idea has been studied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Masoud S. Sakha , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar , Sean Meyn

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-25 Weichen Wu , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Alessandro Rinaldo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 David Cheikhi , Daniel Russo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ethan Blaser , Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang

Value functions arise as a component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in statistics and engineering applications. Computation of the associated Bellman equations is numerically challenging in all but a few special cases. A…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Adithya M. Devraj , Sean P. Meyn

The use of target networks has been a popular and key component of recent deep Q-learning algorithms for reinforcement learning, yet little is known from the theory side. In this work, we introduce a new family of target-based temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Donghwan Lee , Niao He

In this paper we consider the problem of obtaining sharp bounds for the performance of temporal difference (TD) methods with linear function approximation for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes. We show that a simple…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-18 Sergey Samsonov , Daniil Tiapkin , Alexey Naumov , Eric Moulines

We consider the core reinforcement-learning problem of on-policy value function approximation from a batch of trajectory data, and focus on various issues of Temporal Difference (TD) learning and Monte Carlo (MC) policy evaluation. The two…

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

Gradient temporal difference (Gradient TD) algorithms are a popular class of stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms used for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Here, we consider Gradient TD algorithms with an additional heavy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Rohan Deb , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved empirical success in various domains. One core task in DRL is distributional policy evaluation, which involves estimating the return distribution $\eta^\pi$ for a given policy $\pi$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-17 Yang Peng , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang