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Markov Potential Games (MPGs) form an important sub-class of Markov games, which are a common framework to model multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. In particular, MPGs include as a special case the identical-interest setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Pragnya Alatur , Anas Barakat , Niao He

Policy gradient methods enjoy strong practical performance in numerous tasks in reinforcement learning. Their theoretical understanding in multiagent settings, however, remains limited, especially beyond two-player competitive and potential…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Ioannis Anagnostides , Ioannis Panageas , Gabriele Farina , Tuomas Sandholm

Several multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms have been proposed to optimize agents decisions. Due to the complexity of the problem, the majority of the previously developed MARL algorithms assumed agents either had some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-01-16 Sherief Abdallah , Victor Lesser

In order to model risk aversion in reinforcement learning, an emerging line of research adapts familiar algorithms to optimize coherent risk functionals, a class that includes conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). Because optimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Audrey Huang , Liu Leqi , Zachary C. Lipton , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

We investigate reinforcement learning in the setting of Markov decision processes for a large number of exchangeable agents interacting in a mean field manner. Applications include, for example, the control of a large number of robots…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-30 René Carmona , Mathieu Laurière , Zongjun Tan

We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes and study the convergence rates of the natural policy gradient (NPG) and the Q-NPG methods with the log-linear policy class. Using the compatible function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Rui Yuan , Simon S. Du , Robert M. Gower , Alessandro Lazaric , Lin Xiao

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) has become a popular tool for controlling the risk of uncertain outcomes and ensuring reliable performance in highly stochastic sequential decision-making problems. While it has been shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xian Yu , Lei Ying

Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Sergio Rozada , Antonio G. Marques

This work studies a class of non-smooth decentralized multi-agent optimization problems where the agents aim at minimizing a sum of local strongly-convex smooth components plus a common non-smooth term. We propose a general primal-dual…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-13 Sulaiman A. Alghunaim , Ernest K. Ryu , Kun Yuan , Ali H. Sayed

Under mild regularity conditions, gradient-based methods converge globally to a critical point in the single-loss setting. This is known to break down for vanilla gradient descent when moving to multi-loss optimization, but can we hope to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-19 Alistair Letcher

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Pankaj Kumar Barman , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Natural policy gradient (NPG) is a common policy optimization algorithm and can be viewed as mirror ascent in the space of probabilities. Recently, Vaswani et al. [2021] introduced a policy gradient method that corresponds to mirror ascent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Reza Asad , Reza Babanezhad , Issam Laradji , Nicolas Le Roux , Sharan Vaswani

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), primarily due to the curse of dimensionality induced by the non-stationarity of optimal policies. In this work,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-20 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz

Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Prateek Jain , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Policy gradient algorithms have been widely applied to Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning problems in recent years. Regularization with various entropy functions is often used to encourage exploration and improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Haoya Li , Samarth Gupta , Hsiangfu Yu , Lexing Ying , Inderjit Dhillon

Markov games provide a powerful framework for modeling strategic multi-agent interactions in dynamic environments. Traditionally, convergence properties of decentralized learning algorithms in these settings have been established only for…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Chinmay Maheshwari , Manxi Wu , Shankar Sastry

We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Avik Kar , Siddharth Chandak , Rahul Singh , Soumitra Sinhahajari , Eric Moulines , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Nicholas Bambos

We consider a multi-agent optimization problem where agents subject to local, intermittent interactions aim to minimize a sum of local objective functions subject to a global inequality constraint and a global state constraint set. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2012-10-10 Minghui Zhu , Sonia Martinez

In this paper, we explore using deep reinforcement learning for problems with multiple agents. Most existing methods for deep multi-agent reinforcement learning consider only a small number of agents. When the number of agents increases,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-24 Arbaaz Khan , Clark Zhang , Daniel D. Lee , Vijay Kumar , Alejandro Ribeiro

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) optimizes strategic interactions in non-cooperative dynamic games, where agents have misaligned objectives. However, data-driven methods such as multi-agent policy gradients (MA-PG) often suffer…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-13 Jingqi Li , Gechen Qu , Jason J. Choi , Somayeh Sojoudi , Claire Tomlin