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Deep reinforcement learning for high dimensional, hierarchical control tasks usually requires the use of complex neural networks as functional approximators, which can lead to inefficiency, instability and even divergence in the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Yuguang Yang

We study the continuous-time counterpart of Q-learning for reinforcement learning (RL) under the entropy-regularized, exploratory diffusion process formulation introduced by Wang et al. (2020). As the conventional (big) Q-function collapses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Kaicheng Jin , Yang Peng , Jiansheng Yang , Zhihua Zhang

Network slicing promises to provision diversified services with distinct requirements in one infrastructure. Deep reinforcement learning (e.g., deep $\mathcal{Q}$-learning, DQL) is assumed to be an appropriate algorithm to solve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Chen Qi , Yuxiu Hua , Rongpeng Li , Zhifeng Zhao , Honggang Zhang

We propose Q-learning with Adjoint Matching (QAM), a novel TD-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that tackles a long-standing challenge in continuous-action RL: efficient optimization of an expressive diffusion or flow-matching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

Temporal-difference and Q-learning play a key role in deep reinforcement learning, where they are empowered by expressive nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. At the core of their empirical successes is the learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Zhaoran Wang

Training agents via off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large memory, named replay memory, that stores past experiences used for learning. These experiences are sampled, uniformly or non-uniformly, to create the batches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Bumgeun Park , Taeyoung Kim , Woohyeon Moon , Luiz Felipe Vecchietti , Dongsoo Har

We devise a distributional variant of gradient temporal-difference (TD) learning. Distributional reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform the regular one in the recent study \citep{bellemare2017distributional}. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-04 Chao Qu , Shie Mannor , Huan Xu

Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Ray Jiang , Tom Zahavy , Zhongwen Xu , Adam White , Matteo Hessel , Charles Blundell , Hado van Hasselt

Q-learning methods represent a commonly used class of algorithms in reinforcement learning: they are generally efficient and simple, and can be combined readily with function approximators for deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-28 Justin Fu , Aviral Kumar , Matthew Soh , Sergey Levine

Despite remarkable successes, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is not robust to hyperparameterization, implementation details, or small environment changes (Henderson et al. 2017, Zhang et al. 2018). Overcoming such sensitivity is key to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-30 Corentin Tallec , Léonard Blier , Yann Ollivier

Temporal difference (TD) learning is often used to update the estimate of the value function which is used by RL agents to extract useful policies. In this paper, we focus on value function estimation in continual reinforcement learning. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Nishanth Anand , Doina Precup

Recent works have shown that tackling offline reinforcement learning (RL) with a conditional policy produces promising results. The Decision Transformer (DT) combines the conditional policy approach and a transformer architecture, showing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Taku Yamagata , Ahmed Khalil , Raul Santos-Rodriguez

Off-policy reinforcement learning has many applications including: learning from demonstration, learning multiple goal seeking policies in parallel, and representing predictive knowledge. Recently there has been an proliferation of new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-01 Adam White , Martha White

Recent work shows that flow matching can be effective for scalar Q-value function estimation in reinforcement learning (RL), but it remains unclear why or how this approach differs from standard critics. Contrary to conventional belief, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Bhavya Agrawalla , Michal Nauman , Aviral Kumar

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

Multi-step temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it unifies one-step TD learning with Monte Carlo methods in a way where intermediate algorithms can outperform either extreme. They address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Kristopher De Asis , Richard S. Sutton

In this paper, two Q-learning (QL) methods are proposed and their convergence theories are established for addressing the model-free optimal control problem of general nonlinear continuous-time systems. By introducing the Q-function for…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2014-10-14 Biao Luo , Derong Liu , Tingwen Huang

The dominant framework for off-policy multi-goal reinforcement learning involves estimating goal conditioned Q-value function. When learning to achieve multiple goals, data efficiency is intimately connected with the generalization of the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Zhang-Wei Hong , Ge Yang , Pulkit Agrawal

Bias problems in the estimation of $Q$-values are a well-known obstacle that slows down convergence of $Q$-learning and actor-critic methods. One of the reasons of the success of modern RL algorithms is partially a direct or indirect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Leif Döring , Benedikt Wille , Maximilian Birr , Mihail Bîrsan , Martin Slowik