Related papers: An Analysis of Action-Value Temporal-Difference Me…
The average reward is a fundamental performance metric in reinforcement learning (RL) focusing on the long-run performance of an agent. Differential temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms are a major advance for average reward RL as…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental algorithm for estimating value functions in reinforcement learning. Recent finite-time analyses of TD with linear function approximation quantify its theoretical convergence rate. However,…
Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms that combine model-based planning and learned value/policy prior have gained significant recognition for their high data efficiency and superior performance in continuous control. However, we…
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…
The temporal difference (TD) error was first formalized in Sutton (1988), where it was first characterized as the difference between temporally successive predictions, and later, in that same work, formulated as the difference between a…
Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a standard and very successful reinforcement learning approach, at the core of both algorithms that learn the value of a given policy, as well as algorithms which learn how to improve policies.…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging in the common case of delays between events and their sensory perceptions. State-of-the-art (SOTA) state augmentation techniques either suffer from state space explosion or performance degeneration…
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,…
Off-policy prediction -- learning the value function for one policy from data generated while following another policy -- is one of the most challenging subproblems in reinforcement learning. This paper presents empirical results with…
In a broad class of reinforcement learning applications, stochastic rewards have heavy-tailed distributions, which lead to infinite second-order moments for stochastic (semi)gradients in policy evaluation and direct policy optimization. In…
Learning policies from high-dimensional visual inputs, such as pixels and point clouds, is crucial in various applications. Visual reinforcement learning is a promising approach that directly trains policies from visual observations,…
Off-policy learning enables a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to reason counterfactually about policies that are not executed and is one of the most important ideas in RL. It, however, can lead to instability when combined with function…
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…
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…
We derive an equation for temporal difference learning from statistical principles. Specifically, we start with the variational principle and then bootstrap to produce an updating rule for discounted state value estimates. The resulting…
Off-policy algorithms, in which a behavior policy differs from the target policy and is used to gain experience for learning, have proven to be of great practical value in reinforcement learning. However, even for simple convex problems…
We propose a method for meta-learning reinforcement learning algorithms by searching over the space of computational graphs which compute the loss function for a value-based model-free RL agent to optimize. The learned algorithms are…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms update an agent's parameters according to one of several possible rules, discovered manually through years of research. Automating the discovery of update rules from data could lead to more efficient…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can model complex behavior policies for goal-directed sequential decision making tasks. A hallmark of RL algorithms is Temporal Difference (TD) learning: value function for the current state is moved towards a…