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Related papers: Adversarially-Robust TD Learning with Markovian Da…

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Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Tejaram Sangadi , L. A. Prashanth , Krishna Jagannathan

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically rely on the assumption that the environment dynamics and value function can be expressed in terms of a Markovian state representation. However, when state information is only partially observable,…

Adversarially robust learning aims to design algorithms that are robust to small adversarial perturbations on input variables. Beyond the existing studies on the predictive performance to adversarial samples, our goal is to understand…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-21 Yue Xing , Ruizhi Zhang , Guang Cheng

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

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

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 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

This paper studies the exponential stability of random matrix products driven by a general (possibly unbounded) state space Markov chain. It is a cornerstone in the analysis of stochastic algorithms in machine learning (e.g. for parameter…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-02 Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov , Hoi-To Wai

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

Robustness is a key requirement for widespread deployment of machine learning algorithms, and has received much attention in both statistics and computer science. We study a natural model of robustness for high-dimensional statistical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Pranjal Awasthi , Xue Chen , Aravindan Vijayaraghavan

This paper develops an unified framework to study finite-sample convergence guarantees of a large class of value-based asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. We do this by first reformulating the RL algorithms as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri , Sanjay Shakkottai , Karthikeyan Shanmugam

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

When transferring a control policy from simulation to a physical system, the policy needs to be robust to variations in the dynamics to perform well. Commonly, the optimal policy overfits to the approximate model and the corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Michael Lutter , Shie Mannor , Jan Peters , Dieter Fox , Animesh Garg

We study the adversarial robustness in offline reinforcement learning. Given a batch dataset consisting of tuples $(s, a, r, s')$, an adversary is allowed to arbitrarily modify $\epsilon$ fraction of the tuples. From the corrupted dataset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Xuezhou Zhang , Yiding Chen , Jerry Zhu , Wen Sun

High order momentum-based parameter update algorithms have seen widespread applications in training machine learning models. Recently, connections with variational approaches have led to the derivation of new learning algorithms with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-08 Joseph E. Gaudio , Anuradha M. Annaswamy , José M. Moreu , Michael A. Bolender , Travis E. Gibson

We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model. We establish both asymptotic and non-asymptotic versions of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-17 Koulik Khamaru , Ashwin Pananjady , Feng Ruan , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

In reinforcement learning (RL) , one of the key components is policy evaluation, which aims to estimate the value function (i.e., expected long-term accumulated reward) of a policy. With a good policy evaluation method, the RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Yue Wang , Wei Chen , Yuting Liu , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

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

We study the problem of robust linear regression with response variable corruptions. We consider the oblivious adversary model, where the adversary corrupts a fraction of the responses in complete ignorance of the data. We provide a nearly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Arun Sai Suggala , Kush Bhatia , Pradeep Ravikumar , Prateek Jain

We study policy evaluation problems in multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) under a low-rank representation setting. In this setting, we are given $N$ learning tasks where the corresponding value function of these tasks lie in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yitao Bai , Sihan Zeng , Justin Romberg , Thinh T. Doan