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Temporal difference (TD) learning is often used to update the estimate of the value function which is used by RL agents to extract useful policies. In this paper, we focus on value function estimation in continual reinforcement learning. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Nishanth Anand , Doina Precup

Given a dataset on actions and resulting long-term rewards, a direct estimation approach fits value functions that minimize prediction error on the training data. Temporal difference learning (TD) methods instead fit value functions by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 David Cheikhi , Daniel Russo

We study the link between generalization and interference in temporal-difference (TD) learning. Interference is defined as the inner product of two different gradients, representing their alignment. This quantity emerges as being of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-16 Emmanuel Bengio , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

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

We study the convergence behavior of the celebrated temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithm. By looking at the algorithm through the lens of optimization, we first argue that TD can be viewed as an iterative optimization algorithm where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Kavosh Asadi , Shoham Sabach , Yao Liu , Omer Gottesman , Rasool Fakoor

In reinforcement learning (RL), temporal difference (TD) error is known to be related to the firing rate of dopamine neurons. It has been observed that each dopamine neuron does not behave uniformly, but each responds to the TD error in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Taisuke Kobayashi

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

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

This paper revisits the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm for the policy evaluation tasks in reinforcement learning. Typically, the performance of TD(0) and TD($\lambda$) is very sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Oftentimes,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-12 Tao Sun , Han Shen , Tianyi Chen , Dongsheng Li

Relative temporal-difference (TD) learning was introduced to mitigate the slow convergence of TD methods when the discount factor approaches one by subtracting a baseline from the temporal-difference update. While this idea has been studied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Masoud S. Sakha , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar , Sean Meyn

The average reward is a fundamental performance metric in reinforcement learning (RL) focusing on the long-run performance of an agent. Differential temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms are a major advance for average reward RL as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ethan Blaser , Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang

In this paper, we consider the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and derive exact closed-form formulas for the finite-time mean-squared estimation errors of decentralized temporal difference (TD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Xingang Guo , Bin Hu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Shuyu Yin , Tao Luo , Peilin Liu , Zhi-Qin John Xu

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

A computational problem in biological reward-based learning is how credit assignment is performed in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Much research suggests that NAc dopamine encodes temporal-difference (TD) errors for learning value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Jonas Guan , Shon Eduard Verch , Claas Voelcker , Ethan C. Jackson , Nicolas Papernot , William A. Cunningham

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

We propose a new approach to value function approximation which combines linear temporal difference reinforcement learning with subspace identification. In practical applications, reinforcement learning (RL) is complicated by the fact that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Byron Boots , Geoffrey J. Gordon

Robot control using reinforcement learning has become popular, but its learning process generally terminates halfway through an episode for safety and time-saving reasons. This study addresses the problem of the most popular exception…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Taisuke Kobayashi

Temporal difference (TD) learning is one of the main foundations of modern reinforcement learning. This paper studies the use of TD(0), a canonical TD algorithm, to estimate the value function of a given policy from a batch of data. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Brahma Pavse , Ishan Durugkar , Josiah Hanna , Peter Stone

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle