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We study the finite-time convergence of TD learning with linear function approximation under Markovian sampling. Existing proofs for this setting either assume a projection step in the algorithm to simplify the analysis, or require a fairly…

While there are convergence guarantees for temporal difference (TD) learning when using linear function approximators, the situation for nonlinear models is far less understood, and divergent examples are known. Here we take a first step…

Temporal-difference learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation. In this paper, we study the convergence of the regularized non-parametric TD(0) algorithm, in both the independent and Markovian observation settings. In particular,…

We develop a martingale approximation approach to studying the limiting behavior of quadratic forms of Markov chains. We use the technique to examine the asymptotic behavior of lag-window estimators in time series and we apply the results…

Our understanding of reinforcement learning (RL) has been shaped by theoretical and empirical results that were obtained decades ago using tabular representations and linear function approximators. These results suggest that RL methods that…

We discuss the approximation of the value function for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Reward Processes (MRP) with nonlinear functions trained with the Temporal-Difference (TD) learning algorithm. We first consider this problem under a…

We study the convergence of off-policy TD(0) with linear function approximation when used to approximate the expected discounted reward in a Markov chain. It is well known that the combination of off-policy learning and function…

Learning the value function of a given policy (target policy) from the data samples obtained from a different policy (behavior policy) is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This problem is studied under the setting of…

We present for the first time an asymptotic convergence analysis of two time-scale stochastic approximation driven by `controlled' Markov noise. In particular, both the faster and slower recursions have non-additive controlled Markov noise…

We consider emphatic temporal-difference learning algorithms for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes with finite spaces. Such algorithms were recently proposed by Sutton, Mahmood, and White (2015) as an improved…

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…

Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to…

We derive a family of risk-sensitive reinforcement learning methods for agents, who face sequential decision-making tasks in uncertain environments. By applying a utility function to the temporal difference (TD) error, nonlinear…

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…

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,…

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…

Conventional uncertainty-aware temporal difference (TD) learning often assumes a zero-mean Gaussian distribution for TD errors, leading to inaccurate error representations and compromised uncertainty estimation. We introduce a novel…

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…

TD($\lambda$) in value-based MARL algorithms or the Temporal Difference critic learning in Actor-Critic-based (AC-based) algorithms synergistically integrate elements from Monte-Carlo simulation and Q function bootstrapping via dynamic…

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…