English
Related papers

Related papers: Accelerating Multi-Task Temporal Difference Learni…

200 papers

This paper revisits the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm for the policy evaluation tasks in reinforcement learning. Typically, the performance of TD(0) and TD($\lambda$) is very sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Oftentimes,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-12 Tao Sun , Han Shen , Tianyi Chen , Dongsheng Li

In this paper, a new reinforcement learning (RL) method known as the method of temporal differential is introduced. Compared to the traditional temporal-difference learning method, it plays a crucial role in developing novel RL techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Tao Bian , Zhong-Ping Jiang

Temporal difference (TD) learning is one of the main foundations of modern reinforcement learning. This paper studies the use of TD(0), a canonical TD algorithm, to estimate the value function of a given policy from a batch of data. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Brahma Pavse , Ishan Durugkar , Josiah Hanna , Peter Stone

The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haoxing Tian , Zaiwei Chen , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

We study personalized multi-agent average reward TD learning, in which a collection of agents interacts with different environments and jointly learns their respective value functions. We focus on the setting where there exists a shared…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su

This paper analyzes multi-step temporal difference (TD)-learning algorithms within the ``deadly triad'' scenario, characterized by linear function approximation, off-policy learning, and bootstrapping. In particular, we prove that $n$-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

This paper investigates estimating the variance of a temporal-difference learning agent's update target. Most reinforcement learning methods use an estimate of the value function, which captures how good it is for the agent to be in a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-15 Craig Sherstan , Brendan Bennett , Kenny Young , Dylan R. Ashley , Adam White , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Building deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that find a good policy with few samples has proven notoriously challenging. To achieve sample efficiency, recent work has explored updating neural networks with large numbers of gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Claas A Voelcker , Marcel Hussing , Eric Eaton , Amir-massoud Farahmand , Igor Gilitschenski

In this work we describe a novel deep reinforcement learning architecture that allows multiple actions to be selected at every time-step in an efficient manner. Multi-action policies allow complex behaviours to be learnt that would…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-09-07 Jack Harmer , Linus Gisslén , Jorge del Val , Henrik Holst , Joakim Bergdahl , Tom Olsson , Kristoffer Sjöö , Magnus Nordin

The focus of this paper is on stochastic variational inequalities (VI) under Markovian noise. A prominent application of our algorithmic developments is the stochastic policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning. Prior…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-17 Georgios Kotsalis , Guanghui Lan , Tianjiao Li

One of the most basic problems in reinforcement learning (RL) is policy evaluation: estimating the long-term return, i.e., value function, corresponding to a given fixed policy. The celebrated Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Sreejeet Maity , Aritra Mitra

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is emerging as a promising approach to generate adaptive behaviors for robotic platforms. However, a major drawback of using DRL is the data-hungry training regime that requires millions of trial and error…

Emphatic Temporal Difference (TD) methods are a class of off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods involving the use of followon traces. Despite the theoretical success of emphatic TD methods in addressing the notorious deadly triad of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Shangtong Zhang , Shimon Whiteson

Differential temporal difference (TD) methods are value-based reinforcement learning algorithms that have been proposed for infinite-horizon problems. They rely on reward centering, where each reward is centered by the average reward. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Kris De Asis , Mohamed Elsayed , Jiamin He

A common optimization tool used in deep reinforcement learning is momentum, which consists in accumulating and discounting past gradients, reapplying them at each iteration. We argue that, unlike in supervised learning, momentum in Temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Emmanuel Bengio , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

In numerous episodic reinforcement learning (RL) environments, SARSA-based methodologies are employed to enhance policies aimed at maximizing returns over long horizons. Traditional SARSA algorithms face challenges in achieving an optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Mahammad Humayoo

Updating a truncated Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is crucial in representation learning, especially when dealing with large-scale data matrices that continuously evolve in practical scenarios. Aligning SVD-based models with fast-paced…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-01-19 Haoran Deng , Yang Yang , Jiahe Li , Cheng Chen , Weihao Jiang , Shiliang Pu

Reinforcement learning is able to solve complex sequential decision-making tasks but is currently limited by sample efficiency and required computation. To improve sample efficiency, recent work focuses on model-based RL which interleaves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Yi Zhao , Wenshuai Zhao , Rinu Boney , Juho Kannala , Joni Pajarinen

Low-rank Deconvolution (LRD) has appeared as a new multi-dimensional representation model that enjoys important efficiency and flexibility properties. In this work we ask ourselves if this analytical model can compete against Deep Learning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-18 David Reixach , Josep Ramon Morros

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