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Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Andrew Jacobsen , Alan Chan

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

Reward specification plays a central role in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding the agent's behavior. To express non-Markovian rewards, formalisms such as reward machines have been introduced to capture dependencies on histories. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rajarshi Roy , Anirban Majumdar , Ritam Raha , David Parker , Marta Kwiatkowska

The temporal difference (TD) error was first formalized in Sutton (1988), where it was first characterized as the difference between temporally successive predictions, and later, in that same work, formulated as the difference between a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms that combine model-based planning and learned value/policy prior have gained significant recognition for their high data efficiency and superior performance in continuous control. However, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Haotian Lin , Pengcheng Wang , Jeff Schneider , Guanya Shi

We provide a new non-asymptotic analysis of distributed temporal difference learning with linear function approximation. Our approach relies on ``one-shot averaging,'' where $N$ agents run identical local copies of the TD(0) method and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Rui Liu , Alex Olshevsky

We consider large linear and nonlinear fixed point problems, and solution with proximal algorithms. We show that there is a close connection between two seemingly different types of methods from distinct fields: 1) Proximal iterations for…

Numerical Analysis · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Dimitri P. Bertsekas

Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-16 Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Jason D. Lee , Zhaoran Wang

Detecting anomalies has become an increasingly critical function in the financial service industry. Anomaly detection is frequently used in key compliance and risk functions such as financial crime detection fraud and cybersecurity. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Hongda Shen , Eren Kurshan

Reinforcement learning has been applied to many interesting problems such as the famous TD-gammon and the inverted helicopter flight. However, little effort has been put into developing methods to learn policies for complex persistent tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-22 Xiao Li , Calin Belta

We initiate the study of federated reinforcement learning under environmental heterogeneity by considering a policy evaluation problem. Our setup involves $N$ agents interacting with environments that share the same state and action space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Han Wang , Aritra Mitra , Hamed Hassani , George J. Pappas , James Anderson

TD($\lambda$) in value-based MARL algorithms or the Temporal Difference critic learning in Actor-Critic-based (AC-based) algorithms synergistically integrate elements from Monte-Carlo simulation and Q function bootstrapping via dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yue Deng , Zirui Wang , Yin Zhang

One of the fundamental challenges associated with reinforcement learning (RL) is that collecting sufficient data can be both time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we formalize a concept of time reversal symmetry in a Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Brett Barkley , Amy Zhang , David Fridovich-Keil

We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning in discounted Markov decision processes, where the goal is to evaluate a policy in a model-free way by using observations of a state process generated without executing the policy. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Huizhen Yu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Richard S. Sutton

Consider a scenario in which we have a huge labeled dataset ${\cal D}$ and a limited time to train some given learner using ${\cal D}$. Since we may not be able to use the whole dataset, how should we proceed? Questions of this nature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Sergio Filho , Eduardo Laber , Pedro Lazera , Marco Molinaro

We propose a new approach to value function approximation which combines linear temporal difference reinforcement learning with subspace identification. In practical applications, reinforcement learning (RL) is complicated by the fact that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Byron Boots , Geoffrey J. Gordon

Tasks with complex temporal structures and long horizons pose a challenge for reinforcement learning agents due to the difficulty in specifying the tasks in terms of reward functions as well as large variances in the learning signals. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-09-27 Xiao Li , Yao Ma , Calin Belta

There are two distinct approaches to solving reinforcement learning problems, namely, searching in value function space and searching in policy space. Temporal difference methods and evolutionary algorithms are well-known examples of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-02 J. J. Grefenstette , D. E. Moriarty , A. C. Schultz

Deep learning models have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of computer vision tasks. However, their performance often degrades significantly when faced with distribution shifts, such as domain or dataset changes.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Samuel Barbeau , Pedram Fekri , David Osowiechi , Ali Bahri , Moslem Yazdanpanah , Masih Aminbeidokhti , Christian Desrosiers

In numerous episodic reinforcement learning (RL) environments, SARSA-based methodologies are employed to enhance policies aimed at maximizing returns over long horizons. Traditional SARSA algorithms face challenges in achieving an optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Mahammad Humayoo