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arXiv · 2305.16246

Distributed TD(0) with Almost No Communication

Rui Liu·Alex Olshevsky
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Abstract

We provide a new non-asymptotic analysis of distributed temporal difference learning with linear function approximation. Our approach relies on ``one-shot averaging,'' where $N$ agents run identical local copies of the TD(0) method and average the outcomes only once at the very end. We demonstrate a version of the linear time speedup phenomenon, where the convergence time of the distributed process is a factor of $N$ faster than the convergence time of TD(0). This is the first result proving benefits from parallelism for temporal difference methods.

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Rui Liu, Alex Olshevsky. 2023-05-25. Distributed TD(0) with Almost No Communication. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16246

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