Related papers: Regularized Centered Emphatic Temporal Difference …

Reinforcement learning with function approximation can be unstable and even divergent, especially when combined with off-policy learning and Bellman updates. In deep reinforcement learning, these issues have been dealt with empirically by…

This paper analyzes multi-step temporal difference (TD)-learning algorithms within the ``deadly triad'' scenario, characterized by linear function approximation, off-policy learning, and bootstrapping. In particular, we prove that $n$-step…

Building deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that find a good policy with few samples has proven notoriously challenging. To achieve sample efficiency, recent work has explored updating neural networks with large numbers of gradient…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are often unable to generalise well to environment variations in the state space that were not observed during training. This issue is especially problematic for image-based RL, where a change in just one…

Continual learning aims to acquire tasks sequentially without catastrophic forgetting, yet standard strategies face a core tradeoff: regularization-based methods (e.g., EWC) can overconstrain updates when task optima are weakly overlapping,…

Predictive control approaches based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have gained significant attention in microgrid energy optimization. However, existing research often overlooks the issue of uncertainty stemming from imperfect…

This document is a guide to the implementation of true online emphatic TD($\lambda$), a model-free temporal-difference algorithm for learning to make long-term predictions which combines the emphasis idea (Sutton, Mahmood & White 2015) and…

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…

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, but the vanilla TD can substantially suffer from the inherent optimization variance. A variance reduced TD (VRTD) algorithm was…

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…

A second-order $L$-stable exponential time-differencing (ETD) method is developed by combining an ETD scheme with approximating the matrix exponentials by rational functions having real distinct poles (RDP), together with a dimensional…

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference (TD) is the most direct algorithm to learn the value function of a policy. For large or infinite state spaces, exact representations of the value function are usually not available, and it must…

General Value Function (GVF) is a powerful tool to represent both the {\em predictive} and {\em retrospective} knowledge in reinforcement learning (RL). In practice, often multiple interrelated GVFs need to be evaluated jointly with…

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a general and very useful tool for estimating the value function of a given policy, which in turn is required to find good policies. Generally speaking, TD learning updates states whenever they are…

Neural Temporal Difference (TD) Learning is an approximate temporal difference method for policy evaluation that uses a neural network for function approximation. Analysis of Neural TD Learning has proven to be challenging. In this paper we…

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…

In experimenting with off-policy temporal difference (TD) methods in hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) systems, we have observed unwanted on-policy learning under reproducible conditions. Here we present modifications to several TD…

Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (EDMD) is a popular data-driven method to approximate the action of the Koopman operator on a linear function space spanned by a dictionary of functions. The accuracy of EDMD model critically depends on…

We propose and analyze an alternate approach to off-policy multi-step temporal difference learning, in which off-policy returns are corrected with the current Q-function in terms of rewards, rather than with the target policy in terms of…

We propose a novel value approximation method, namely Eigensubspace Regularized Critic (ERC) for deep reinforcement learning (RL). ERC is motivated by an analysis of the dynamics of Q-value approximation error in the Temporal-Difference…