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Value functions derived from Markov decision processes arise as a central component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in many statistics and engineering applications of machine learning techniques. Computation of the solution to…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a cornerstone reinforcement learning (RL) method for policy evaluation, where the goal is to estimate the value function of a Markov decision process under a fixed policy. While a substantial body of…
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…
In traditional statistical learning, data points are usually assumed to be independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) following an unknown probability distribution. This paper presents a contrasting viewpoint, perceiving data points…
Temporal-difference (TD) learning is widely regarded as one of the most popular algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its widespread use, it has only been recently that researchers have begun to actively study its finite time…
Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to…
Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms with neural network function parameterization have well-established empirical success in many practical large-scale reinforcement learning tasks. However, theoretical understanding of these…
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 this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a…
Temporal-difference learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation. In this paper, we study the convergence of the regularized non-parametric TD(0) algorithm, in both the independent and Markovian observation settings. In particular,…
Value functions arise as a component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in statistics and engineering applications. Computation of the associated Bellman equations is numerically challenging in all but a few special cases. A…
For continuous systems modeled by dynamical equations such as ODEs and SDEs, Bellman's Principle of Optimality takes the form of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, which provides the theoretical target of reinforcement learning…
Reinforcement learning algorithms typically rely on the assumption that the environment dynamics and value function can be expressed in terms of a Markovian state representation. However, when state information is only partially observable,…
The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…
We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning in discounted Markov decision processes, where the goal is to evaluate a policy in a model-free way by using observations of a state process generated without executing the policy. To…
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,…
Unlike the standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) model, many real-world tasks are non-Markovian, whose rewards are predicated on state history rather than solely on the current state. Solving a non-Markovian task, frequently applied in…
Gradient descent or its variants are popular in training neural networks. However, in deep Q-learning with neural network approximation, a type of reinforcement learning, gradient descent (also known as Residual Gradient (RG)) is barely…
While there are convergence guarantees for temporal difference (TD) learning when using linear function approximators, the situation for nonlinear models is far less understood, and divergent examples are known. Here we take a first step…
Our understanding of reinforcement learning (RL) has been shaped by theoretical and empirical results that were obtained decades ago using tabular representations and linear function approximators. These results suggest that RL methods that…