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The temporal-difference methods TD($\lambda$) and Sarsa($\lambda$) form a core part of modern reinforcement learning. Their appeal comes from their good performance, low computational cost, and their simple interpretation, given by their…
In reinforcement learning, the TD($\lambda$) algorithm is a fundamental policy evaluation method with an efficient online implementation that is suitable for large-scale problems. One practical drawback of TD($\lambda$) is its sensitivity…
We study the problem of learning-augmented predictive linear quadratic control. Our goal is to design a controller that balances \textit{"consistency"}, which measures the competitive ratio when predictions are accurate, and…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…
In reinforcement learning (RL), temporal difference (TD) errors are widely adopted for optimizing value and policy functions. However, since the TD error is defined by a bootstrap method, its computation tends to be noisy and destabilize…
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…
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.…
We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…
In this paper we introduce the idea of improving the performance of parametric temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithms by selectively emphasizing or de-emphasizing their updates on different time steps. In particular, we show that…
The true online TD({\lambda}) algorithm has recently been proposed (van Seijen and Sutton, 2014) as a universal replacement for the popular TD({\lambda}) algorithm, in temporal-difference learning and reinforcement learning. True online…
Unifying seemingly disparate algorithmic ideas to produce better performing algorithms has been a longstanding goal in reinforcement learning. As a primary example, TD($\lambda$) elegantly unifies one-step TD prediction with Monte Carlo…
Temporal-difference (TD) learning is an important field in reinforcement learning. Sarsa and Q-Learning are among the most used TD algorithms. The Q($\sigma$) algorithm (Sutton and Barto (2017)) unifies both. This paper extends the…
Instruction tuning of language models has demonstrated the ability to enhance model generalization to unseen tasks via in-context learning using a few examples. However, typical supervised learning still requires a plethora of downstream…
This document is a guide to the implementation of true online emphatic TD($\lambda$), a model-free temporal-difference algorithm for learning to make long-term predictions which combines the emphasis idea (Sutton, Mahmood & White 2015) and…
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…
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…
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 the problem of designing control policies that satisfy high-level specifications described by signal temporal logic (STL) in unknown, stochastic environments. While many existing works concentrate on optimizing the…
We study the problem of controlling linear time-invariant systems with known noisy dynamics and adversarially chosen quadratic losses. We present the first efficient online learning algorithms in this setting that guarantee $O(\sqrt{T})$…
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…