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Modern reinforcement learning (RL) commonly engages practical problems with large state spaces, where function approximation must be deployed to approximate either the value function or the policy. While recent progresses in RL theory…
In the classical framework of local distributed network computing, it is generally assumed that the entities executing distributed algorithms are altruistic. However, in various scenarios, the value of the output produced by an entity may…
Actor-critic methods integrating target networks have exhibited a stupendous empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, a theoretical understanding of the use of target networks in actor-critic methods is largely missing in…
Efficiently learning equilibria with large state and action spaces in general-sum Markov games while overcoming the curse of multi-agency is a challenging problem. Recent works have attempted to solve this problem by employing independent…
This paper considers the problem of designing optimal algorithms for reinforcement learning in two-player zero-sum games. We focus on self-play algorithms which learn the optimal policy by playing against itself without any direct…
Self-play, where the algorithm learns by playing against itself without requiring any direct supervision, has become the new weapon in modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) for achieving superhuman performance in practice. However, the…
We propose a new framework of Markov $\alpha$-potential games to study Markov games. We show that any Markov game with finite-state and finite-action is a Markov $\alpha$-potential game, and establish the existence of an associated…
This paper considers two-player zero-sum finite-horizon Markov games with simultaneous moves. The study focuses on the challenging settings where the value function or the model is parameterized by general function classes. Provably…
This paper studies multi-agent reinforcement learning in Markov games, with the goal of learning Nash equilibria or coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) sample-optimally. All prior results suffer from at least one of the two obstacles: the…
In this work we introduce a new model of decision-making by agents in a social network. Agents have innate preferences over the strategies but, because of the social interactions, the decision of the agents are not only affected by their…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL), which finds an optimal policy using an empirical model, has long been recognized as one of the corner stones of RL. It is especially suitable for multi-agent RL (MARL), as it naturally decouples the…
A significant roadblock to the development of principled multi-agent reinforcement learning is the fact that desired solution concepts like Nash equilibria may be intractable to compute. To overcome this obstacle, we take inspiration from…
Softmax policy gradient is a popular algorithm for policy optimization in single-agent reinforcement learning, particularly since projection is not needed for each gradient update. However, in multi-agent systems, the lack of central…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has made substantial empirical progresses in solving games with a large number of players. However, theoretically, the best known sample complexity for finding a Nash equilibrium in general-sum games…
Decentralized Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms have been widely utilized for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and have achieved remarkable success. Apart from its empirical success, the theoretical convergence property of decentralized…
We study Markov potential games under the infinite horizon average reward criterion. Most previous studies have been for discounted rewards. We prove that both algorithms based on independent policy gradient and independent natural policy…
We study the problem of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with adaptivity constraints -- a new problem motivated by real-world applications where deployments of new policies are costly and the number of policy updates must be…
Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms often suffer from an exponential sample complexity dependence on the number of agents, a phenomenon known as \emph{the curse of multiagents}. In this paper, we address this challenge by…
We study online learning in two-player uninformed Markov games, where the opponent's actions and policies are unobserved. In this setting, Tian et al. (2021) show that achieving no-external-regret is impossible without incurring an…