2024/07/02 by Antony Vijesh, Vijesh, Antony, S R Shreyas +1
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Text and Document Classification Technologies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.02369
openalex publication_date 2024/07/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Q-learning is a stochastic approximation version of the classic value iteration. The literature has established that Q-learning suffers from both maximization bias and slower convergence. Recently, multi-step algorithms have shown practical advantages over existing methods. This paper proposes a novel off-policy two-step Q-learning algorithms, without importance sampling. With suitable assumption it was shown that, iterates in the proposed two-step Q-learning is bounded and converges almost surely to the optimal Q-values. This study also address the convergence analysis of the smooth version of two-step Q-learning, i.e., by replacing max function with the log-sum-exp function. The proposed algorithms are robust and easy to implement. Finally, we test the proposed algorithms on benchmark problems such as the roulette problem, maximization bias problem, and randomly generated Markov decision processes and compare it with the existing methods available in literature. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of both the two-step Q-learning and its smooth variants.