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Standard regression techniques, while powerful, are often constrained by predefined, differentiable loss functions such as mean squared error. These functions may not fully capture the desired behavior of a system, especially when dealing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Yongchao Huang

Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation (linear TD) is a classic and powerful prediction algorithm in reinforcement learning. While it is well-understood that linear TD converges almost surely to a unique point,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang

The convergence of many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with linear function approximation has been investigated extensively but most proofs assume that these methods converge to a unique solution. In this paper, we provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Marcus Hutter , Samuel Yang-Zhao , Sultan J. Majeed

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

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can learn complex policies to optimize agent operation over time. RL algorithms have shown promising results in solving complicated problems in recent years. However, their application on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Hamed Khorasgani , Haiyan Wang , Chetan Gupta , Susumu Serita

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-07 Jalaj Bhandari , Daniel Russo , Raghav Singal

We consider the problem of Reinforcement Learning for nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems. We show that in the RL setting, there is an inherent ``Curse of Variance" in addition to Bellman's infamous ``Curse of Dimensionality", in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Raman Goyal , Suman Chakravorty , Ran Wang , Mohamed Naveed Gul Mohamed

This manuscript surveys reinforcement learning from the perspective of optimization and control with a focus on continuous control applications. It surveys the general formulation, terminology, and typical experimental implementations of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-11-13 Benjamin Recht

We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-05-18 Arunselvan Ramaswamy , Shalabh Bhatnagar

In this paper we propose two algorithms in the tabular setting and an algorithm for the function approximation setting for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem. SSP problems form an important class of problems in Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Soumyajit Guin , Shalabh Bhatnagar

$Q$-learning with function approximation is one of the most empirically successful while theoretically mysterious reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, and was identified in Sutton (1999) as one of the most important theoretical open…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Zaiwei Chen , John Paul Clarke , Siva Theja Maguluri

We propose controller synthesis for state regulation problems in which a human operator shares control with an autonomy system, running in parallel. The autonomy system continuously improves over human action, with minimal intervention, and…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-09-23 Murad Abu-Khalaf , Sertac Karaman , Daniela Rus

Linear TD($\lambda$) is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms for policy evaluation. Previously, convergence rates are typically established under the assumption of linearly independent features, which does not hold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

Learning the value function of a given policy (target policy) from the data samples obtained from a different policy (behavior policy) is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This problem is studied under the setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-14 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Chandramouli Kamanchi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Value function approximation has demonstrated phenomenal empirical success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, despite a handful of recent progress on developing theory for RL with linear function approximation, the understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Lin F. Yang

Many reinforcement learning methods achieve great success in practice but lack theoretical foundation. In this paper, we study the convergence analysis on the problem of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The global linear convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-09 Zeyu Jin , Johann Michael Schmitt , Zaiwen Wen

While there are convergence guarantees for temporal difference (TD) learning when using linear function approximators, the situation for nonlinear models is far less understood, and divergent examples are known. Here we take a first step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-12 David Brandfonbrener , Joan Bruna

We consider a class of $\ell_0$-regularized linear-quadratic (LQ) optimal control problems. This class of problems is obtained by augmenting a penalizing sparsity measure to the cost objective of the standard linear-quadratic regulator…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-07-31 MirSaleh Bahavarnia

This paper studies the robustness of reinforcement learning algorithms to errors in the learning process. Specifically, we revisit the benchmark problem of discrete-time linear quadratic regulation (LQR) and study the long-standing open…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-16 Bo Pang , Zhong-Ping Jiang

This chapter studies emerging cyber-attacks on reinforcement learning (RL) and introduces a quantitative approach to analyze the vulnerabilities of RL. Focusing on adversarial manipulation on the cost signals, we analyze the performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-22 Yunhan Huang , Quanyan Zhu