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Mean Field Game (MFG) models implicitly assume "rational expectations", meaning that the heterogeneous agents being modeled correctly know all relevant transition probabilities for the complex system they inhabit. When there is common…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-02-26 Benjamin Moll , Lenya Ryzhik

This paper studies the discrete-time linear-quadratic-Gaussian mean field (MF) social control problem in an infinite horizon, where the dynamics of all agents are unknown. The objective is to design a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-05 Hanfang Zhang , Bing-Chang Wang , Shuo Chen

Myopic exploration policies such as epsilon-greedy, softmax, or Gaussian noise fail to explore efficiently in some reinforcement learning tasks and yet, they perform well in many others. In fact, in practice, they are often selected as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Lin F. Yang

In complex environments with high dimension, training a reinforcement learning (RL) model from scratch often suffers from lengthy and tedious collection of agent-environment interactions. Instead, leveraging expert demonstration to guide RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Zhaorun Chen , Binhao Chen , Shenghan Xie , Liang Gong , Chengliang Liu , Zhengfeng Zhang , Junping Zhang

The mean field algorithm is a widely used approximate inference algorithm for graphical models whose exact inference is intractable. In each iteration of mean field, the approximate marginals for each variable are updated by getting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-23 Yujia Li , Richard Zemel

Finding the minimal structural assumptions that empower sample-efficient learning is one of the most important research directions in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This paper advances our understanding of this fundamental question by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-19 Chi Jin , Qinghua Liu , Sobhan Miryoosefi

We consider learning approximate Nash equilibria for discrete-time mean-field games with nonlinear stochastic state dynamics subject to both average and discounted costs. To this end, we introduce a mean-field equilibrium (MFE) operator,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-11-11 Berkay Anahtarcı , Can Deha Karıksız , Naci Saldi

This paper studies the generalization properties of a recently proposed kernel method, the Random Feature models with Learnable Activation Functions (RFLAF). By applying a data-dependent sampling scheme for generating features, we provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Zailin Ma , Jiansheng Yang , Yaodong Yang

Designing efficient algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is fundamentally challenging because the size of the joint state and action spaces grows exponentially in the number of agents. These difficulties are exacerbated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Emile Anand , Ishani Karmarkar , Guannan Qu

Mean Field Games (MFG) have been introduced to tackle games with a large number of competing players. Considering the limit when the number of players is infinite, Nash equilibria are studied by considering the interaction of a typical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-14 Mathieu Lauriere

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

Mean-field theory is an approximation replacing an extended system by a few variables. For depinning of elastic manifolds, these are the position of its center of mass $u$, and the statistics of the forces $F(u)$. There are two proposals to…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-01-19 Cathelijne ter Burg , Kay Joerg Wiese

Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) has attracted attention due to its capability to enhance reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, in terms of data efficiency and generalizability. In this paper, we develop a bilevel optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Siyuan Xu , Minghui Zhu

Recent breakthroughs in Go play and strategic games have witnessed the great potential of reinforcement learning in intelligently scheduling in uncertain environment, but some bottlenecks are also encountered when we generalize this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Xingxing Liang , Qi Wang , Yanghe Feng , Zhong Liu , Jincai Huang

In this article, from the viewpoint of control theory, we discuss the relationships among the commonly used monotonicity conditions that ensure the well-posedness of the solutions arising from problems of mean field games (MFGs) and mean…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-09 Alain Bensoussan , Ziyu Huang , Shanjian Tang , Sheung Chi Phillip Yam

We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Aurko Roy , Huan Xu , Sebastian Pokutta

The formally exact framework of equilibrium Density Functional Theory (DFT) is capable of simultaneously and consistently describing thermodynamic and structural properties of interacting many-body systems in arbitrary external potentials.…

We establish a connection between federated learning, a concept from machine learning, and mean-field games, a concept from game theory and control theory. In this analogy, the local federated learners are considered as the players and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-09 Arash Mehrjou

A mean-field game (MFG) seeks the Nash Equilibrium of a game involving a continuum of players, where the Nash Equilibrium corresponds to a fixed point of the best-response mapping. However, simple fixed-point iterations do not always…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-15 Jiajia Yu , Xiuyuan Cheng , Jian-Guo Liu , Hongkai Zhao