English
Related papers

Related papers: Cochain Perspectives on Temporal-Difference Signal…

200 papers

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) enhances the scalability of decision-making in long-horizon tasks by introducing temporal abstraction through options-policies that span multiple timesteps. Despite its theoretical appeal, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Hemanath Arumugam , Falong Fan , Bo Liu

Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Marta Kwiatkowska , Yarin Gal

We introduce a generalization of temporal-difference (TD) learning to networks of interrelated predictions. Rather than relating a single prediction to itself at a later time, as in conventional TD methods, a TD network relates each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-04-22 Richard S. Sutton , Brian Tanner

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

The task of predicting long-term patient outcomes using supervised machine learning is a challenging one, in part because of the high variance of each patient's trajectory, which can result in the model over-fitting to the training data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Thomas Frost , Kezhi Li , Steve Harris

We propose a novel nonparametric approach for linking covariates to Continuous Time Markov Chains (CTMCs) using the mathematical framework of Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS). CTMCs provide a robust framework for modeling…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-07 Yuchen Han , Arnab Ganguly , Riten Mitra

TD-learning is a foundation reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for value prediction. Critical to the accuracy of value predictions is the quality of state representations. In this work, we consider the question: how does end-to-end…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Yunhao Tang , Rémi Munos

Several applications of Reinforcement Learning suffer from instability due to high variance. This is especially prevalent in high dimensional domains. Regularization is a commonly used technique in machine learning to reduce variance, at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-12 Pierre Thodoroff , Audrey Durand , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

This paper applies a reinforcement learning (RL) method to solve infinite horizon continuous-time stochastic linear quadratic problems, where drift and diffusion terms in the dynamics may depend on both the state and control. Based on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-17 Na Li , Xun Li , Jing Peng , Zuo Quan Xu

Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Amrit Singh Bedi , Anjaly Parayil , Junyu Zhang , Mengdi Wang , Alec Koppel

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

Several real-world scenarios, such as remote control and sensing, are comprised of action and observation delays. The presence of delays degrades the performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, often to such an extent that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-18 Somjit Nath , Mayank Baranwal , Harshad Khadilkar

We discuss the approximation of the value function for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Reward Processes (MRP) with nonlinear functions trained with the Temporal-Difference (TD) learning algorithm. We first consider this problem under a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Andrea Agazzi , Jianfeng Lu

Most value function learning algorithms in reinforcement learning are based on the mean squared (projected) Bellman error. However, squared errors are known to be sensitive to outliers, both skewing the solution of the objective and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Andrew Patterson , Victor Liao , Martha White

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an important field of research in machine learning that is increasingly being applied to complex optimization problems in physics. In parallel, concepts from physics have contributed to important advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Argenis Arriojas , Jacob Adamczyk , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Temporal difference learning with linear function approximation is a popular method to obtain a low-dimensional approximation of the value function of a policy in a Markov Decision Process. We give a new interpretation of this method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Rui Liu , Alex Olshevsky

Linear TD($\lambda$) is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms for policy evaluation. Previously, convergence rates are typically established under the assumption of linearly independent features, which does not hold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

In this paper, which is a continuation of the previously published discrete time paper we develop a theory for continuous time stochastic control problems which, in various ways, are time inconsistent in the sense that they do not admit a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-12-13 Tomas Björk , Mariana Khapko , Agatha Murgoci

Koopman spectral theory has provided a new perspective in the field of dynamical systems in recent years. Modern dynamical systems are becoming increasingly non-linear and complex, and there is a need for a framework to model these systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Alexander Krolicki , Pierre-Yves Lavertu

We investigate the finite-time convergence properties of Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation, a cornerstone algorithm in the field of reinforcement learning. We are interested in the so-called ``robust''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Wei-Cheng Lee , Francesco Orabona