{"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/regularized-q-learning-through-robust","title":"Regularized Q-learning through Robust Averaging","arxiv_id":"2405.02201","date":"2024-05-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Peter Schmitt-Förster","Tobias Sutter"],"abstract":"We propose a new Q-learning variant, called 2RA Q-learning, that addresses some weaknesses of existing Q-learning methods in a principled manner. One such weakness is an underlying estimation bias which cannot be controlled and often results in poor performance. We propose a distributionally robust estimator for the maximum expected value term, which allows us to precisely control the level of estimation bias introduced. The distributionally robust estimator admits a closed-form solution such that the proposed algorithm has a computational cost per iteration comparable to Watkins' Q-learning. For the tabular case, we show that 2RA Q-learning converges to the optimal policy and analyze its asymptotic mean-squared error. Lastly, we conduct numerical experiments for various settings, which corroborate our theoretical findings and indicate that 2RA Q-learning often performs better than existing methods.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02201v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.02201v2.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":"regularized-q-learning-through-robust","repo_url":"https://github.com/2raq/code","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"q-learning","task_name":"Q-Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"q-learning","method_name":"Q-Learning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}