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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Rong J. B. Zhu , James M. Murray

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…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-05-18 Arunselvan Ramaswamy , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Classical supervised learning via empirical risk (or negative log-likelihood) minimization hinges upon the assumption that the testing distribution coincides with the training distribution. This assumption can be challenged in modern…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-02 Yassine Laguel , Jérôme Malick , Zaid Harchaoui

Recent policy optimization approaches have achieved substantial empirical success by constructing surrogate optimization objectives. The Approximate Policy Iteration objective (Schulman et al., 2015a; Kakade and Langford, 2002) has become a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-31 Marcin B. Tomczak , Sergio Valcarcel Macua , Enrique Munoz de Cote , Peter Vrancx

The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement learning (RL)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-23 Donghwan Lee , Hyungjin Yoon , Naira Hovakimyan

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

In temporal difference (TD) learning, off-policy sampling is known to be more practical than on-policy sampling, and by decoupling learning from data collection, it enables data reuse. It is known that policy evaluation (including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri , Sanjay Shakkottai , Karthikeyan Shanmugam

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

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

The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for a class of multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal-difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-29 Donghwan Lee , Jianghai Hu

Establishing robust policies is essential to counter attacks or disturbances affecting deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents. Recent studies explore state-adversarial robustness and suggest the potential lack of an optimal robust policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Haoran Li , Zicheng Zhang , Wang Luo , Congying Han , Yudong Hu , Tiande Guo , Shichen Liao

Continual learning aims to sequentially learn new tasks without forgetting previous tasks' knowledge (catastrophic forgetting). One factor that can cause forgetting is the interference between the gradients on losses from different tasks.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Xueying Bai , Jinghuan Shang , Yifan Sun , Niranjan Balasubramanian

Obtaining first-order regret bounds -- regret bounds scaling not as the worst-case but with some measure of the performance of the optimal policy on a given instance -- is a core question in sequential decision-making. While such bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Philip Amortila , Doina Precup , Prakash Panangaden , Marc G. Bellemare

We study the problem of computing the value function from a discretely-observed trajectory of a continuous-time diffusion process. We develop a new class of algorithms based on easily implementable numerical schemes that are compatible with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Wenlong Mou , Yuhua Zhu

Despite impressive results, reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from slow convergence and requires a large variety of tuning strategies. In this paper, we investigate the ability of RL algorithms on simple continuous control tasks. We show…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Daniel Layeghi , Steve Tonneau , Michael Mistry

We address the problem of incremental sequence classification, where predictions are updated as new elements in the sequence are revealed. Drawing on temporal-difference learning from reinforcement learning, we identify a…

This work provides the first finite-time convergence guarantees for linearly constrained stochastic bilevel optimization using only first-order methods, requiring solely gradient information without any Hessian computations or second-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-18 Cac Phan , Kai Wang

Temporal difference learning and Residual Gradient methods are the most widely used temporal difference based learning algorithms; however, it has been shown that none of their objective functions is optimal w.r.t approximating the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-21 Bo Liu , Daoming Lyu , Wen Dong , Saad Biaz

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-25 Weichen Wu , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Alessandro Rinaldo