English
Related papers

Related papers: Analysis of Off-Policy $n$-Step TD-Learning with L…

200 papers

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy's value function. TD($\lambda$), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Jianfei Ma

TD($\lambda$) with function approximation has proved empirically successful for some complex reinforcement learning problems. For linear approximation, TD($\lambda$) has been shown to minimise the squared error between the approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Lex Weaver , Jonathan Baxter

Temporal-difference (TD) learning is highly effective at controlling and evaluating an agent's long-term outcomes. Most approaches in this paradigm implement a semi-gradient update to boost the learning speed, which consists of ignoring the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Théo Vincent , Kevin Gerhardt , Yogesh Tripathi , Habib Maraqten , Adam White , Martha White , Jan Peters , Carlo D'Eramo

Value functions derived from Markov decision processes arise as a central component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in many statistics and engineering applications of machine learning techniques. Computation of the solution to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Adithya M. Devraj , Ioannis Kontoyiannis , Sean P. Meyn

In experimenting with off-policy temporal difference (TD) methods in hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) systems, we have observed unwanted on-policy learning under reproducible conditions. Here we present modifications to several TD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Mitchell Keith Bloch

We present a novel $l_1$ regularized off-policy convergent TD-learning method (termed RO-TD), which is able to learn sparse representations of value functions with low computational complexity. The algorithmic framework underlying RO-TD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Bo Liu , Sridhar Mahadevan , Ji Liu

In this paper we provide a rigorous convergence analysis of a "off"-policy temporal difference learning algorithm with linear function approximation and per time-step linear computational complexity in "online" learning environment. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-20 Prasenjit Karmakar , Rajkumar Maity , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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

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

We consider the problem of continuous-time policy evaluation. This consists in learning through observations the value function associated with an uncontrolled continuous-time stochastic dynamic and a reward function. We propose two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Ziad Kobeissi , Francis Bach

Sample efficiency is crucial for imitation learning methods to be applicable in real-world applications. Many studies improve sample efficiency by extending adversarial imitation to be off-policy regardless of the fact that these off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Mingfei Sun , Sam Devlin , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

Dynamic Programming suffers from the curse of dimensionality due to large state and action spaces, a challenge further compounded by uncertainties in the environment. To mitigate these issue, we explore an off-policy based Temporal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-05 Ali Forootani , Raffaele Iervolino , Massimo Tipaldi , Mohammad Khosravi

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

Off-policy learning is key to scaling up reinforcement learning as it allows to learn about a target policy from the experience generated by a different behavior policy. Unfortunately, it has been challenging to combine off-policy learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-04 Ahmed Touati , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup , Pascal Vincent

Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Andrew Jacobsen , Alan Chan

Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms with neural network function parameterization have well-established empirical success in many practical large-scale reinforcement learning tasks. However, theoretical understanding of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Zhifa Ke , Zaiwen Wen , Junyu Zhang

Many off-policy prediction learning algorithms have been proposed in the past decade, but it remains unclear which algorithms learn faster than others. We empirically compare 11 off-policy prediction learning algorithms with linear function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Sina Ghiassian , Richard S. Sutton

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

In this paper we present the first empirical study of the emphatic temporal-difference learning algorithm (ETD), comparing it with conventional temporal-difference learning, in particular, with linear TD(0), on on-policy and off-policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-15 Sina Ghiassian , Banafsheh Rafiee , Richard S. Sutton

Q-Learning is a fundamental off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that has the objective of approximating action-value functions in order to learn optimal policies. Nonetheless, it has difficulties in reconciling bias with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-22 Mahammad Humayoo