An Analysis of Reinforcement Learning with Function Approximation

Francisco S. Melo, Sean P. Meyn, M. Isabel Ribeiro

We address the problem of computing the optimal Q-function in Markov decision problems with infinite state-space. We analyze the convergence properties of several variations of Q-learning when combined with function approximation, extending the analysis of TD-learning in Tsitsiklis and Van Roy (1996) to stochastic control settings. We identify conditions under which such approximate methods converge with probability 1. We conclude with a brief discussion on the general applicability of our results and compare them with several related works.