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Variance reduction techniques have been successfully applied to temporal-difference (TD) learning and help to improve the sample complexity in policy evaluation. However, the existing work applied variance reduction to either the less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Shaocong Ma , Yi Zhou , Shaofeng Zou

The field of Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to derive effective policies from pre-collected datasets without active environment interaction. While traditional offline RL algorithms like Conservative Q-Learning (CQL) and Implicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Ali Murtaza Caunhye , Asad Jeewa

A default assumption in reinforcement learning (RL) and optimal control is that observations arrive at discrete time points on a fixed clock cycle. Yet, many applications involve continuous-time systems where the time discretization, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Zichen Zhang , Johannes Kirschner , Junxi Zhang , Francesco Zanini , Alex Ayoub , Masood Dehghan , Dale Schuurmans

Federated learning (FL) can dramatically speed up reinforcement learning by distributing exploration and training across multiple agents. It can guarantee an optimal convergence rate that scales linearly in the number of agents, i.e., a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Ankur Naskar , Gugan Thoppe , Utsav Negi , Vijay Gupta

In this work we describe a novel deep reinforcement learning architecture that allows multiple actions to be selected at every time-step in an efficient manner. Multi-action policies allow complex behaviours to be learnt that would…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-09-07 Jack Harmer , Linus Gisslén , Jorge del Val , Henrik Holst , Joakim Bergdahl , Tom Olsson , Kristoffer Sjöö , Magnus Nordin

In tabular multi-agent reinforcement learning with average-cost criterion, a team of agents sequentially interacts with the environment and observes local incentives. We focus on the case that the global reward is a sum of local rewards,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-26 Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Bhargav Ganguly , Vaneet Aggarwal

We devise a distributional variant of gradient temporal-difference (TD) learning. Distributional reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform the regular one in the recent study \citep{bellemare2017distributional}. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-04 Chao Qu , Shie Mannor , Huan Xu

In the context of average-reward reinforcement learning, the requirement for oracle knowledge of the mixing time, a measure of the duration a Markov chain under a fixed policy needs to achieve its stationary distribution, poses a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Bhrij Patel , Wesley A. Suttle , Alec Koppel , Vaneet Aggarwal , Brian M. Sadler , Amrit Singh Bedi , Dinesh Manocha

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-12 David Brandfonbrener , Joan Bruna

Temporal difference methods enable efficient estimation of value functions in reinforcement learning in an incremental fashion, and are of broader interest because they correspond learning as observed in biological systems. Standard value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Brendan Bennett , Wesley Chung , Muhammad Zaheer , Vincent Liu

Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Tejaram Sangadi , L. A. Prashanth , Krishna Jagannathan

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes policies for reward but imposes few constraints on how decisions evolve over time. As a result, policies may achieve high performance while exhibiting temporally incoherent behavior such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Sukesh Subaharan

We study the convergence of off-policy TD(0) with linear function approximation when used to approximate the expected discounted reward in a Markov chain. It is well known that the combination of off-policy learning and function…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-02 Maik Overmars , Jasper Goseling , Richard Boucherie

TD($\lambda$) in value-based MARL algorithms or the Temporal Difference critic learning in Actor-Critic-based (AC-based) algorithms synergistically integrate elements from Monte-Carlo simulation and Q function bootstrapping via dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yue Deng , Zirui Wang , Yin Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can model complex behavior policies for goal-directed sequential decision making tasks. A hallmark of RL algorithms is Temporal Difference (TD) learning: value function for the current state is moved towards a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Sahil Sharma , Girish Raguvir J , Srivatsan Ramesh , Balaraman Ravindran

The recency heuristic in reinforcement learning is the assumption that stimuli that occurred closer in time to an acquired reward should be more heavily reinforced. The recency heuristic is one of the key assumptions made by TD($\lambda$),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Brett Daley , Marlos C. Machado , Martha White

Credit assignmen, disentangling each agent's contribution to a shared reward, is a critical challenge in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). To be effective, credit assignment methods must preserve the environment's…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Aditya Kapoor , Kale-ab Tessera , Mayank Baranwal , Harshad Khadilkar , Jan Peters , Stefano Albrecht , Mingfei Sun

The hallmark feature of temporal-difference (TD) learning is bootstrapping: using value predictions to generate new value predictions. The vast majority of TD methods for control learn a policy by bootstrapping from a single action-value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Brett Daley , Prabhat Nagarajan , Martha White , Marlos C. Machado

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms that combine model-based planning and learned value/policy prior have gained significant recognition for their high data efficiency and superior performance in continuous control. However, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Haotian Lin , Pengcheng Wang , Jeff Schneider , Guanya Shi

In this paper, we study the Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear value function approximation. It is well known that most TD learning algorithms are unstable with linear function approximation and off-policy learning. Recent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-10-06 Dominik Meyer , Hao Shen , Klaus Diepold