English
Related papers

Related papers: Bridging the Gap Between Average and Discounted TD…

200 papers

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy's value function. TD($\lambda$), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Jianfei Ma

Temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it combines ideas from dynamic programming and Monte Carlo methods in a way that allows for online and incremental model-free learning. A key idea of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-21 Kristopher De Asis , Brendan Bennett , Richard S. Sutton

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

In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

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

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,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-25 Eloïse Berthier , Ziad Kobeissi , Francis Bach

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-03 Manuel Schneckenreither

In this paper we consider the problem of obtaining sharp bounds for the performance of temporal difference (TD) methods with linear function approximation for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes. We show that a simple…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-18 Sergey Samsonov , Daniil Tiapkin , Alexey Naumov , Eric Moulines

We study the problem of infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning with linear Markov decision processes (MDPs). The associated Bellman operator of the problem not being a contraction makes the algorithm design challenging.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Kihyuk Hong , Woojin Chae , Yufan Zhang , Dabeen Lee , Ambuj Tewari

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

We extend the options framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning from discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) to average-reward MDPs. Our contributions include general convergent off-policy inter-option learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Yi Wan , Abhishek Naik , Richard S. Sutton

We study personalized multi-agent average reward TD learning, in which a collection of agents interacts with different environments and jointly learns their respective value functions. We focus on the setting where there exists a shared…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Hwanwoo Kim , Panos Toulis , Eric Laber

The use of target networks has been a popular and key component of recent deep Q-learning algorithms for reinforcement learning, yet little is known from the theory side. In this work, we introduce a new family of target-based temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Donghwan Lee , Niao He

We study the finite-time behaviour of the popular temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm when combined with tail-averaging. We derive finite time bounds on the parameter error of the tail-averaged TD iterate under a step-size choice…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Gandharv Patil , Prashanth L. A. , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Doina Precup

We establish novel and general high-dimensional concentration inequalities and Berry-Esseen bounds for vector-valued martingales induced by Markov chains. We apply these results to analyze the performance of the Temporal Difference (TD)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-22 Weichen Wu , Yuting Wei , Alessandro Rinaldo

The goal of this manuscript is to conduct a controltheoretic analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithms. TD-learning serves as a cornerstone in the realm of reinforcement learning, offering a methodology for approximating the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Donghwan Lee , Do Wan Kim

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,…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Zhifa Ke , Zaiwen Wen , Junyu Zhang

We study policy evaluation problems in multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) under a low-rank representation setting. In this setting, we are given $N$ learning tasks where the corresponding value function of these tasks lie in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yitao Bai , Sihan Zeng , Justin Romberg , Thinh T. Doan