Related papers: Regularized Centered Emphatic Temporal Difference …
Robot learning in high-dimensional control settings, such as humanoid locomotion, presents persistent challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms due to unstable dynamics, complex contact interactions, and sensitivity to…
Most efforts to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) involve either scaling the number of parameters and the size of training data, or scaling inference computation by letting models generate complex chains of…
In traditional statistical learning, data points are usually assumed to be independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) following an unknown probability distribution. This paper presents a contrasting viewpoint, perceiving data points…
In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…
In reinforcement learning, temporal abstraction in the action space, exemplified by action repetition, is a technique to facilitate policy learning through extended actions. However, a primary limitation in previous studies of action…
Multi-step temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it unifies one-step TD learning with Monte Carlo methods in a way where intermediate algorithms can outperform either extreme. They address…
We propose a unified framework to study policy evaluation (PE) and the associated temporal difference (TD) methods for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space. We show that PE is equivalent to maintaining the martingale…
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…
Advanced reasoning in LLMs on challenging domains like mathematical reasoning can be tackled using verifiable rewards based reinforced fine-tuning (ReFT). In standard ReFT frameworks, a behavior model generates multiple completions with…
We explore fixed-horizon temporal difference (TD) methods, reinforcement learning algorithms for a new kind of value function that predicts the sum of rewards over a $\textit{fixed}$ number of future time steps. To learn the value function…
The task of predicting long-term patient outcomes using supervised machine learning is a challenging one, in part because of the high variance of each patient's trajectory, which can result in the model over-fitting to the training data.…
Non-Markovian dynamics are commonly found in real-world environments due to long-range dependencies, partial observability, and memory effects. The Bellman equation that is the central pillar of Reinforcement learning (RL) becomes only…
Chemotherapy dose optimization can be formulated as a dynamic treatment regime, requiring sequential decisions under uncertainty that must balance tumor suppression against toxicity. However, most reinforcement learning approaches assume…
We study the multi-step off-policy learning approach to distributional RL. Despite the apparent similarity between value-based RL and distributional RL, our study reveals intriguing and fundamental differences between the two cases in the…
Exploration in sparse reward environments remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly in Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs), where environments differ across episodes. Existing episodic intrinsic…
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,…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental technique in reinforcement learning that updates value estimates for states or state-action pairs using a TD target. This target represents an improved estimate of the true value by…
One of the most basic problems in reinforcement learning (RL) is policy evaluation: estimating the long-term return, i.e., value function, corresponding to a given fixed policy. The celebrated Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm…
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…
Several applications of Reinforcement Learning suffer from instability due to high variance. This is especially prevalent in high dimensional domains. Regularization is a commonly used technique in machine learning to reduce variance, at…