{"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/gamma-models-generative-temporal-difference","title":"Gamma-Models: Generative Temporal Difference Learning for Infinite-Horizon Prediction","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2020-12-01","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2020 12","authors":["Michael Janner","Igor Mordatch","Sergey Levine"],"abstract":"We introduce the gamma-model, a predictive model of environment dynamics with an infinite, probabilistic horizon. Replacing standard single-step models with gamma-models leads to generalizations of the procedures that form the foundation of model-based control, including the model rollout and model-based value estimation. The gamma-model, trained with a generative reinterpretation of temporal difference learning, is a natural continuous analogue of the successor representation and a hybrid between model-free and model-based mechanisms. Like a value function, it contains information about the long-term future; like a standard predictive model, it is independent of task reward. We instantiate the gamma-model as both a generative adversarial network and normalizing flow, discuss how its training reflects an inescapable tradeoff between training-time and testing-time compounding errors, and empirically investigate its utility for prediction and control.","url_abs":"http://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/hash/12ffb0968f2f56e51a59a6beb37b2859-Abstract.html","url_pdf":"http://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/file/12ffb0968f2f56e51a59a6beb37b2859-Paper.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":"gamma-models-generative-temporal-difference","repo_url":"https://github.com/JannerM/gamma-models","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Generative Adversarial Network"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}