Related papers: Smoothing Policy Iteration for Zero-sum Markov Gam…
This paper investigates value function approximation in the context of zero-sum Markov games, which can be viewed as a generalization of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework to the two-agent case. We generalize error bounds from MDPs…
Optimal policies in standard MDPs can be obtained using either value iteration or policy iteration. However, in the case of zero-sum Markov games, there is no efficient policy iteration algorithm; e.g., it has been shown that one has to…
We introduce two Smoothed Policy Iteration algorithms (\textbf{SPI}s) as rules for learning policies and methods for computing Nash equilibria in second order potential Mean Field Games (MFGs). Global convergence is proved if the coupling…
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) -- where multiple agents learn to interact in a shared dynamic environment -- permeates across a wide range of critical applications. While there has been substantial progress on understanding the…
Similar to the role of Markov decision processes in reinforcement learning, Stochastic Games (SGs) lay the foundation for the study of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and sequential agent interactions. In this paper, we derive…
Policy-based methods with function approximation are widely used for solving two-player zero-sum games with large state and/or action spaces. However, it remains elusive how to obtain optimization and statistical guarantees for such…
Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…
This paper studies policy optimization algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning. We begin by proposing an algorithm framework for two-player zero-sum Markov Games in the full-information setting, where each iteration consists of a…
Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) aims at provable guarantees that a learned policy is at least approximately as good as a given baseline policy. Building on SPI with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping (Soft-SPIBB) by Nadjahi et al., we identify…
Computing approximate Nash equilibria in multi-player general-sum Markov games is a computationally intractable task. However, multi-player Markov games with certain cooperative or competitive structures might circumvent this…
We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
We study episodic two-player zero-sum Markov games (MGs) in the offline setting, where the goal is to find an approximate Nash equilibrium (NE) policy pair based on a dataset collected a priori. When the dataset does not have uniform…
Nash equilibrium is a popular solution concept for solving imperfect-information games in practice. However, it has a major drawback: it does not preclude suboptimal play in branches of the game tree that are not reached in equilibrium.…
Synthesizing near-optimal mixed strategies for zero-sum differential games (ZSDGs) has been a longstanding challenge. Existing research mainly focuses on characterizing the theoretical value function, while the practical design of…
Policy gradient methods have become a staple of any single-agent reinforcement learning toolbox, due to their combination of desirable properties: iterate convergence, efficient use of stochastic trajectory feedback, and theoretically-sound…
This paper addresses a fundamental issue central to approximation methods for solving large Markov decision processes (MDPs): how to automatically learn the underlying representation for value function approximation? A novel theoretically…
We propose a policy iteration method to solve an inverse problem for a mean-field game (MFG) model, specifically to reconstruct the obstacle function in the game from the partial observation data of value functions, which represent the…
We develop provably efficient reinforcement learning algorithms for two-player zero-sum finite-horizon Markov games with simultaneous moves. To incorporate function approximation, we consider a family of Markov games where the reward…
We consider the infinite-horizon discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. We focus on several approximate variations of the Policy Iteration algorithm: Approximate Policy Iteration, Conservative Policy…