# Mid-way Recap [[mid-way-recap]]

Before diving into Q-Learning, let's summarize what we've just learned.

We have two types of value-based functions:

- State-value function: outputs the expected return if **the agent starts at a given state and acts according to the policy forever after.**
- Action-value function: outputs the expected return if **the agent starts in a given state, takes a given action at that state** and then acts accordingly to the policy forever after.
- In value-based methods, rather than learning the policy, **we define the policy by hand** and we learn a value function. If we have an optimal value function, we **will have an optimal policy.**

There are two types of methods to update the value function:

- With *the Monte Carlo method*, we update the value function from a complete episode, and so we **use the actual discounted return of this episode.**
- With *the TD Learning method,* we update the value function from a step, replacing the unknown \\(G_t\\) with **an estimated return called the TD target.**

