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Motivated by engineering applications such as resource allocation in networks and inventory systems, we consider average-reward Reinforcement Learning with unbounded state space and reward function. Recent works studied this problem in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Shaan Ul Haque , Siva Theja Maguluri

While Value Iteration (VI) is one of the most fundamental algorithms in Reinforcement Learning, its theoretical convergence guarantees still exhibit a persistent mismatch with empirical behavior. In the discounted-reward case, classical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Arsenii Mustafin , Xinyi Sheng , Dominik Baumann

Standard meta-learning for representation learning aims to find a common representation to be shared across multiple tasks. The effectiveness of these methods is often limited when the nuances of the tasks' distribution cannot be captured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Giulia Denevi , Massimiliano Pontil , Carlo Ciliberto

Off-policy algorithms, in which a behavior policy differs from the target policy and is used to gain experience for learning, have proven to be of great practical value in reinforcement learning. However, even for simple convex problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Rong J. B. Zhu , James M. Murray

In this paper, we provide a unified analysis of temporal difference learning algorithms with linear function approximators by exploiting their connections to Markov jump linear systems (MJLS). We tailor the MJLS theory developed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Bin Hu , Usman Ahmed Syed

Temporal difference learning and Residual Gradient methods are the most widely used temporal difference based learning algorithms; however, it has been shown that none of their objective functions is optimal w.r.t approximating the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-21 Bo Liu , Daoming Lyu , Wen Dong , Saad Biaz

Balancing between computational efficiency and sample efficiency is an important goal in reinforcement learning. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms stochastically update the value function, with a linear time complexity in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-21 Clement Gehring , Yangchen Pan , Martha White

This paper considers the policy evaluation problem in a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) environment over decentralized and directed networks. The focus is on decentralized temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-01 Zhaoxian Wu , Han Shen , Tianyi Chen , Qing Ling

We consider a distributed setup for reinforcement learning, where each agent has a copy of the same Markov Decision Process but transitions are sampled from the corresponding Markov chain independently by each agent. We show that in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Haoxing Tian , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

Reinforcement learning (RL) typically defines a discount factor as part of the Markov Decision Process. The discount factor values future rewards by an exponential scheme that leads to theoretical convergence guarantees of the Bellman…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-01 William Fedus , Carles Gelada , Yoshua Bengio , Marc G. Bellemare , Hugo Larochelle

We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Navdeep Kumar , Yashaswini Murthy , Itai Shufaro , Kfir Y. Levy , R. Srikant , Shie Mannor

Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Matthias Schultheis , Constantin A. Rothkopf , Heinz Koeppl

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

Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Ray Jiang , Tom Zahavy , Zhongwen Xu , Adam White , Matteo Hessel , Charles Blundell , Hado van Hasselt

This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning with hyperbolic discounting. Combining a new temporal difference error with the hyperbolic discounting in recursive manner and reward-punishment framework, a new scheme to learn the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

Linear temporal logic (LTL) is a powerful language for task specification in reinforcement learning, as it allows describing objectives beyond the expressivity of conventional discounted return formulations. Nonetheless, recent works have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Marco Bagatella , Andreas Krause , Georg Martius

In this paper, we introduce a method for adapting the step-sizes of temporal difference (TD) learning. The performance of TD methods often depends on well chosen step-sizes, yet few algorithms have been developed for setting the step-size…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-11 Alex Kearney , Vivek Veeriah , Jaden B. Travnik , Richard S. Sutton , Patrick M. Pilarski

TD($\lambda$) with function approximation has proved empirically successful for some complex reinforcement learning problems. For linear approximation, TD($\lambda$) has been shown to minimise the squared error between the approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Lex Weaver , Jonathan Baxter

This paper proposes a computationally tractable algorithm for learning infinite-horizon average-reward linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the Bellman optimality condition. Our algorithm for linear mixture MDPs achieves a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Woojin Chae , Kihyuk Hong , Yufan Zhang , Ambuj Tewari , Dabeen Lee

In this paper we propose several novel distributed gradient-based temporal difference algorithms for multi-agent off-policy learning of linear approximation of the value function in Markov decision processes with strict information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Milos S. Stankovic , Marko Beko , Srdjan S. Stankovic