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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-10 Yun Shen , Michael J. Tobia , Tobias Sommer , Klaus Obermayer

Meta reinforcement learning aims to develop policies that generalize to unseen tasks sampled from a task distribution. While context-based meta-RL methods improve task representation using task latents, they often struggle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jeongmo Kim , Yisak Park , Minung Kim , Seungyul Han

In most of the transfer learning approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) the distribution over the tasks is assumed to be stationary. Therefore, the target and source tasks are i.i.d. samples of the same distribution. In the context of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Giuseppe Canonaco , Andrea Soprani , Manuel Roveri , Marcello Restelli

In large-scale distributed machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Aritra Mitra , George J. Pappas , Hamed Hassani

We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning methods for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes with finite spaces and discounted reward criteria, and we present a collection of convergence results for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Huizhen Yu

State-action value functions (i.e., Q-values) are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning (RL), giving rise to popular algorithms such as SARSA and Q-learning. We propose a new notion of action value defined by a Gaussian smoothed version of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , George Tucker , Dale Schuurmans

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

Reinforcement learning has been applied to many interesting problems such as the famous TD-gammon and the inverted helicopter flight. However, little effort has been put into developing methods to learn policies for complex persistent tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-22 Xiao Li , Calin Belta

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

Training a neural network (NN) typically relies on some type of curve-following method, such as gradient descent (GD) (and stochastic gradient descent (SGD)), ADADELTA, ADAM or limited memory algorithms. Convergence for these algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-08 Michael A Kouritzin , Stephen Styles , Beatrice-Helen Vritsiou

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms that learn policies by trial-and-error must learn from limited amounts of data collected by actively interacting with the environment. While many prior works have shown that proper regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Qiyang Li , Aviral Kumar , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

Many value-based deep reinforcement learning algorithms rely on target networks - lagged copies of the online network - to stabilize training. While effective, this mechanism introduces a fundamental stability-recency tradeoff: slower…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Leonard S. Pleiss , James Harrison , Maximilian Schiffer

Recent work shows that flow matching can be effective for scalar Q-value function estimation in reinforcement learning (RL), but it remains unclear why or how this approach differs from standard critics. Contrary to conventional belief, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Bhavya Agrawalla , Michal Nauman , Aviral Kumar

Despite recent successes in Reinforcement Learning, value-based methods often suffer from high variance hindering performance. In this paper, we illustrate this in a continuous control setting where state of the art methods perform poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-24 Pierre Thodoroff , Nishanth Anand , Lucas Caccia , Doina Precup , Joelle Pineau

Using insight from numerical approximation of ODEs and the problem formulation and solution methodology of TD learning through a Galerkin relaxation, I propose a new class of TD learning algorithms. After applying the improved numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Caleb Bowyer

Temporal Difference learning or TD($\lambda$) is a fundamental algorithm in the field of reinforcement learning. However, setting TD's $\lambda$ parameter, which controls the timescale of TD updates, is generally left up to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-02 Timothy A. Mann , Hugo Penedones , Shie Mannor , Todd Hester

Temporal distances lie at the heart of many algorithms for planning, control, and reinforcement learning that involve reaching goals, allowing one to estimate the transit time between two states. However, prior attempts to define such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Vivek Myers , Chongyi Zheng , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine , Benjamin Eysenbach

Learning and planning in partially-observable domains is one of the most difficult problems in reinforcement learning. Traditional methods consider these two problems as independent, resulting in a classical two-stage paradigm: first learn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Tianyu Li , Bogdan Mazoure , Doina Precup , Guillaume Rabusseau

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved significant success in solving single-goal tasks. However, uniform goal selection often results in sample inefficiency in multi-goal settings where agents must learn a universal goal-conditioned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera

Real-world visual data rarely presents as isolated, static instances. Instead, it often evolves gradually over time through variations in pose, lighting, object state, or scene context. However, conventional classifiers are typically…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Xi Ding , Lei Wang , Piotr Koniusz , Yongsheng Gao