{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/distributional-bellman-operators-over-mean","title":"Distributional Bellman Operators over Mean Embeddings","arxiv_id":"2312.07358","date":"2023-12-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Li Kevin Wenliang","Grégoire Delétang","Matthew Aitchison","Marcus Hutter","Anian Ruoss","Arthur Gretton","Mark Rowland"],"abstract":"We propose a novel algorithmic framework for distributional reinforcement learning, based on learning finite-dimensional mean embeddings of return distributions. We derive several new algorithms for dynamic programming and temporal-difference learning based on this framework, provide asymptotic convergence theory, and examine the empirical performance of the algorithms on a suite of tabular tasks. Further, we show that this approach can be straightforwardly combined with deep reinforcement learning, and obtain a new deep RL agent that improves over baseline distributional approaches on the Arcade Learning Environment.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07358v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.07358v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"distributional-bellman-operators-over-mean","repo_url":"https://github.com/google-deepmind/sketch_dqn","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"jax","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"atari-games","task_name":"Atari Games"},{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"distributional-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Distributional Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}