{"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/neural-temporal-difference-learning-converges","title":"Neural Temporal-Difference and Q-Learning Provably Converge to Global Optima","arxiv_id":"1905.10027","date":"2019-05-24","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2019 12","authors":["Qi Cai","Zhuoran Yang","Jason D. Lee","Zhaoran Wang"],"abstract":"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 nonconvexity and even divergence in optimization. As a result, the global convergence of neural TD remains unclear. In this paper, we prove for the first time that neural TD converges at a sublinear rate to the global optimum of the mean-squared projected Bellman error for policy evaluation. In particular, we show how such global convergence is enabled by the overparametrization of neural networks, which also plays a vital role in the empirical success of neural TD. Beyond policy evaluation, we establish the global convergence of neural (soft) Q-learning, which is further connected to that of policy gradient algorithms.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10027v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.10027v2.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":"neural-temporal-difference-learning-converges","repo_url":"https://github.com/water-bridge/2020rl","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"q-learning","task_name":"Q-Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1905.10027","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}