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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle synthesize more optimal behavior from a dataset consisting only of suboptimal trials. One way that this can happen is by "stitching" together the best parts of otherwise suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

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

Restricted Boltzmann Machines are simple and powerful generative models that can encode any complex dataset. Despite all their advantages, in practice the trainings are often unstable and it is difficult to assess their quality because the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Nicolas Béreux , Aurélien Decelle , Cyril Furtlehner , Beatriz Seoane

Multi-step temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it unifies one-step TD learning with Monte Carlo methods in a way where intermediate algorithms can outperform either extreme. They address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Kristopher De Asis , Richard S. Sutton

Reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle let robots automatically adapt to new tasks, but current RL methods require a large number of trials to accomplish this. In this paper, we tackle rapid adaptation to new tasks through the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) depends critically on the choice of reward functions used to capture the de- sired behavior and constraints of a robot. Usually, these are handcrafted by a expert designer and represent heuristics for relatively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Xiao Li , Cristian-Ioan Vasile , Calin Belta

It is still common to use Q-learning and temporal difference (TD) learning-even though they have divergence issues and sound Gradient TD alternatives exist-because divergence seems rare and they typically perform well. However, recent work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-21 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Shivam Garg , Dhawal Gupta , Adam White , Martha White

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have yielded impressive reasoning improvements in language models, yet it remains unclear whether post-training truly extends a model's reasoning ability beyond what it acquires during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Charlie Zhang , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful, general tool for learning complex behaviors. However, its sample efficiency is often impractically large for solving challenging real-world problems, even with off-policy algorithms such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Vitchyr Pong , Shixiang Gu , Murtaza Dalal , Sergey Levine

Solving partial differential equations in high dimensions by deep neural network has brought significant attentions in recent years. In many scenarios, the loss function is defined as an integral over a high-dimensional domain. Monte-Carlo…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-11-06 Jingrun Chen , Rui Du , Panchi Li , Liyao Lyu

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-07 Jalaj Bhandari , Daniel Russo , Raghav Singal

We establish novel and general high-dimensional concentration inequalities and Berry-Esseen bounds for vector-valued martingales induced by Markov chains. We apply these results to analyze the performance of the Temporal Difference (TD)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-22 Weichen Wu , Yuting Wei , Alessandro Rinaldo

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach to complex decision making. However, one issue that limits its practical application is its brittleness, sometimes failing to train in the presence of small changes in the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Jung-Hoon Cho , Vindula Jayawardana , Sirui Li , Cathy Wu

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

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool utilization. However, the generalization of tool-augmented reinforcement learning (RL) across diverse domains remains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zhengyu Chen , Jinluan Yang , Teng Xiao , Ruochen Zhou , Luan Zhang , Xiangyu Xi , Xiaowei Shi , Wei Wang , Jinggang Wang

Ensuring that reinforcement learning (RL) controllers satisfy safety and reliability constraints in real-world settings remains challenging: state-avoidance and constrained Markov decision processes often fail to capture trajectory-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Calin Belta , Ming C. Lin

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

Neural Temporal Difference (TD) Learning is an approximate temporal difference method for policy evaluation that uses a neural network for function approximation. Analysis of Neural TD Learning has proven to be challenging. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Haoxing Tian , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

Despite significant progress, deep reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from data-inefficiency and limited generalization. Recent efforts apply meta-learning to learn a meta-learner from a set of RL tasks such that a novel but related task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Lin Lan , Zhenguo Li , Xiaohong Guan , Pinghui Wang

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yunxiang Li , Mark Schmidt , Reza Babanezhad , Sharan Vaswani