Limiting-Kernel Q(λ): Bridging Short and Long Horizons

In reinforcement learning, more accurate policy evaluation has been frequently shown to improve downstream policy optimization performance. For tractability, most value estimators rely on n-step truncation and thereby omit the long-horizon behavior of the transition dynamics. Methods that instead capture this behavior through the global structure of the dynamics can converge faster, but their computational and memory requirements limit their scalability to large or continuous state spaces. To reconcile these limitations, we introduce Limiting-Kernel Q(λ) (LKQL), an off-policy value estimator that uses the limiting kernel to approximate the long-horizon terms omitted by truncation. LKQL has the same order of complexity as n-step estimators and integrates directly into both on- and off-policy actor-critic algorithms. We prove that, under aperiodicity and in the near-on-policy regime, the operator underlying LKQL improves the policy evaluation convergence rate over its truncated counterpart for sufficiently large n, and that LKQL itself converges almost surely to the optimal values in finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) under a fixed behavior policy. On the MuJoCo continuous-control benchmark, we show that LKQL improves over n-step baselines in most settings, particularly on long-horizon tasks.