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We analyse quantile temporal-difference learning (QTD), a distributional reinforcement learning algorithm that has proven to be a key component in several successful large-scale applications of reinforcement learning. Despite these…

Integral to recent successes in deep reinforcement learning has been a class of temporal difference methods that use infrequently updated target values for policy evaluation in a Markov Decision Process. Yet a complete theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Mattie Fellows , Matthew J. A. Smith , Shimon Whiteson

Policy evaluation algorithms are essential to reinforcement learning due to their ability to predict the performance of a policy. However, there are two long-standing issues lying in this prediction problem that need to be tackled:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Daoming Lyu , Bo Liu , Matthieu Geist , Wen Dong , Saad Biaz , Qi Wang

Linear TD($\lambda$) is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms for policy evaluation. Previously, convergence rates are typically established under the assumption of linearly independent features, which does not hold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with clustered data, which is commonly encountered in healthcare applications. We propose a generalized fitted Q-iteration (FQI) algorithm that incorporates generalized estimating equations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Liyuan Hu , Jitao Wang , Zhenke Wu , Chengchun Shi

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is computationally efficient but often yields inferior generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). This gap is primarily driven by RL's use of on-policy data. We propose a framework to bridge this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Miaosen Zhang , Yishan Liu , Shuxia Lin , Xu Yang , Qi Dai , Chong Luo , Weihao Jiang , Peng Hou , Anxiang Zeng , Xin Geng , Baining Guo

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

We present a novel theoretical framework, Q-MMR, for off-policy evaluation in finite-horizon MDPs. Q-MMR learns a set of scalar weights, one for each data point, such that the reweighted rewards approximate the expected return under the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Nan Jiang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), which seeks to learn an optimal policy using offline data, has garnered significant interest due to its potential in critical applications where online data collection is infeasible or expensive. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Jiin Woo , Laixi Shi , Gauri Joshi , Yuejie Chi

In this paper, we delve into the statistical analysis of the fitted Q-evaluation (FQE) method, which focuses on estimating the value of a target policy using offline data generated by some behavior policy. We provide a comprehensive…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-06-18 Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

Recently, supervised learning (SL) methodology has emerged as an effective approach for offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their simplicity, stability, and efficiency. However, recent studies show that SL methods lack the trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Xing Lei , Zifeng Zhuang , Shentao Yang , Sheng Xu , Yunhao Luo , Fei Shen , Wenyan Yang , Xuetao Zhang , Donglin Wang

In many finite horizon episodic reinforcement learning (RL) settings, it is desirable to optimize for the undiscounted return - in settings like Atari, for instance, the goal is to collect the most points while staying alive in the long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Joshua Romoff , Peter Henderson , Ahmed Touati , Emma Brunskill , Joelle Pineau , Yann Ollivier

General Value Function (GVF) is a powerful tool to represent both the {\em predictive} and {\em retrospective} knowledge in reinforcement learning (RL). In practice, often multiple interrelated GVFs need to be evaluated jointly with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Tengyu Xu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Yingbin Liang

We initiate the study of federated reinforcement learning under environmental heterogeneity by considering a policy evaluation problem. Our setup involves $N$ agents interacting with environments that share the same state and action space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Han Wang , Aritra Mitra , Hamed Hassani , George J. Pappas , James Anderson

Tree Search (TS) is crucial to some of the most influential successes in reinforcement learning. Here, we tackle two major challenges with TS that limit its usability: \textit{distribution shift} and \textit{scalability}. We first discover…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Assaf Hallak , Gal Dalal , Steven Dalton , Iuri Frosio , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik

Value approximation using deep neural networks is at the heart of off-policy deep reinforcement learning, and is often the primary module that provides learning signals to the rest of the algorithm. While multi-layer perceptron networks are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-10 Ge Yang , Anurag Ajay , Pulkit Agrawal

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

We investigate the explainability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies from a temporal perspective, focusing on the sequence of future outcomes associated with individual actions. In RL, value functions compress information about rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Franco Ruggeri , Alessio Russo , Rafia Inam , Karl Henrik Johansson

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

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