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Motivated by applications in large-scale and multi-agent reinforcement learning, we study the non-asymptotic performance of stochastic approximation (SA) schemes with delayed updates under Markovian sampling. While the effect of delays has…

In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Bo Liu , Ian Gemp , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Ji Liu , Sridhar Mahadevan , Marek Petrik

Recent non-asymptotic analyses have substantially advanced the theory of distributional policy evaluation, but they largely concern synchronous full-state updates under a generative model, model-based estimators, accelerated variants, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ege C. Kaya , Abolfazl Hashemi

Stochastic approximation (SA) is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of an operator using noisy samples and widely used in optimization and Reinforcement Learning (RL). The noise in RL exhibits a Markovian structure, and in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Shaan Ul Haque , Sajad Khodadadian , Siva Theja Maguluri

Replication of experimental results has been a challenge faced by many scientific disciplines, including the field of machine learning. Recent work on the theory of machine learning has formalized replicability as the demand that an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

The finite-time convergence of off-policy TD learning has been comprehensively studied recently. However, such a type of convergence has not been well established for off-policy TD learning in the multi-agent setting, which covers broader…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-25 Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Rongrong Chen

Despite the wide applications of Adam in reinforcement learning (RL), the theoretical convergence of Adam-type RL algorithms has not been established. This paper provides the first such convergence analysis for two fundamental RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Huaqing Xiong , Tengyu Xu , Yingbin Liang , Wei Zhang

We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Anna Winnicki , R. Srikant

We study the so-called two-time-scale stochastic approximation, a simulation-based approach for finding the roots of two coupled nonlinear operators. Our focus is to characterize its finite-time performance in a Markov setting, which often…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-06 Thinh T. Doan

Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a popular approach for solving fixed-point equations where the information is corrupted by noise. In this paper, we consider an SA involving a contraction mapping with respect to an arbitrary norm, and show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri , Sanjay Shakkottai , Karthikeyan Shanmugam

We study stochastic approximation procedures for approximately solving a $d$-dimensional linear fixed point equation based on observing a trajectory of length $n$ from an ergodic Markov chain. We first exhibit a non-asymptotic bound of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-14 Wenlong Mou , Ashwin Pananjady , Martin J. Wainwright , Peter L. Bartlett

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Yunhao Tang , Rémi Munos

Two-time-scale stochastic approximation algorithms are iterative methods used in applications such as optimization, reinforcement learning, and control. Finite-time analysis of these algorithms has primarily focused on fixed point…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-09 Siddharth Chandak

In this paper, we formalize the almost sure convergence of $Q$-learning and linear temporal difference (TD) learning with Markovian samples using the Lean 4 theorem prover based on the Mathlib library. $Q$-learning and linear TD are among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Shangtong Zhang

Gradient-based temporal difference (GTD) algorithms are widely used in off-policy learning scenarios. Among them, the two time-scale TD with gradient correction (TDC) algorithm has been shown to have superior performance. In contrast to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Tengyu Xu , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang

Stochastic approximation is a powerful class of algorithms with celebrated success. However, a large body of previous analysis focuses on stochastic approximations driven by contractive operators, which is not applicable in some important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Ethan Blaser , Shangtong Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Ali Devran Kara

Greedy-GQ is an off-policy two timescale algorithm for optimal control in reinforcement learning. This paper develops the first finite-sample analysis for the Greedy-GQ algorithm with linear function approximation under Markovian noise. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-21 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

In traditional statistical learning, data points are usually assumed to be independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) following an unknown probability distribution. This paper presents a contrasting viewpoint, perceiving data points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yangchen Pan , Junfeng Wen , Chenjun Xiao , Philip Torr

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