June 10, 2019
In many finite horizon episodic reinforcement learning (RL) settings, it is desirable to optimize for the undiscounted return – in settings like Atari, for instance, the goal is to collect the most points while staying alive in the long run. Yet, it may be difficult (or even intractable) mathematically to learn with this target. As such, temporal discounting is often applied to optimize over a shorter effective planning horizon. This comes at the cost of potentially biasing the optimization target away from the undiscounted goal. In settings where this bias is unacceptable – where the system must optimize for longer horizons at higher discounts – the target of the value function approximator may increase in variance leading to difficulties in learning. We present an extension of temporal difference (TD) learning, which we call TD(∆), that breaks down a value function into a series of components based on the differences between value functions with smaller discount factors. The separation of a longer horizon value function into these components has useful properties in scalability and performance. We discuss these properties and show theoretic and empirical improvements over standard TD learning in certain settings.
Publisher
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
May 14, 2025
Brandon M. Wood, Misko Dzamba, Xiang Fu, Meng Gao, Muhammed Shuaibi, Luis Barroso-Luque, Kareem Abdelmaqsoud, Vahe Gharakhanyan, John R. Kitchin, Daniel S. Levine, Kyle Michel, Anuroop Sriram, Taco Cohen, Abhishek Das, Ammar Rizvi, Sushree Jagriti Sahoo, Zachary W. Ulissi, C. Lawrence Zitnick
May 14, 2025
May 13, 2025
Marlène Careil, Yohann Benchetrit, Jean-Rémi King
May 13, 2025
April 25, 2025
Rulin Shao, Qiao Rui, Varsha Kishore, Niklas Muennighoff, Victoria Lin, Daniela Rus, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Sewon Min, Scott Yih, Pang Wei Koh, Luke Zettlemoyer
April 25, 2025
April 17, 2025
Ansong Ni, Ruta Desai, Yang Li, Xinjie Lei, Dong Wang, Ramya Raghavendra, Gargi Ghosh, Daniel Li (FAIR), Asli Celikyilmaz
April 17, 2025
April 08, 2021
Caner Hazirbas, Joanna Bitton, Brian Dolhansky, Jacqueline Pan, Albert Gordo, Cristian Canton Ferrer
April 08, 2021
April 30, 2018
Tomer Galanti, Lior Wolf, Sagie Benaim
April 30, 2018
April 30, 2018
Yedid Hoshen, Lior Wolf
April 30, 2018
December 11, 2019
Eliya Nachmani, Lior Wolf
December 11, 2019
Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models