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We present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to solve infinite horizon asymptotic Mean Field Game (MFG) and Mean Field Control (MFC) problems. Our approach can be described as a unified two-timescale Mean Field Q-learning: The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-01 Andrea Angiuli , Jean-Pierre Fouque , Mathieu Laurière

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

This paper presents a general mean-field game (GMFG) framework for simultaneous learning and decision-making in stochastic games with a large population. It first establishes the existence of a unique Nash Equilibrium to this GMFG, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Xin Guo , Anran Hu , Renyuan Xu , Junzi Zhang

Mean Field Games (MFGs) have been introduced to efficiently approximate games with very large populations of strategic agents. Recently, the question of learning equilibria in MFGs has gained momentum, particularly using model-free…

Concave Utility Reinforcement Learning (CURL) extends RL from linear to concave utilities in the occupancy measure induced by the agent's policy. This encompasses not only RL but also imitation learning and exploration, among others. Yet,…

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), despite its popularity and empirical success, suffers from the curse of dimensionality. This paper builds the mathematical framework to approximate cooperative MARL by a mean-field control (MFC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-04 Haotian Gu , Xin Guo , Xiaoli Wei , Renyuan Xu

Traditional multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms are not scalable to environments with more than a few agents, since these algorithms are exponential in the number of agents. Recent research has introduced successful methods to…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian , Matthew E. Taylor , Mark Crowley , Pascal Poupart

We present a method enabling a large number of agents to learn how to flock, which is a natural behavior observed in large populations of animals. This problem has drawn a lot of interest but requires many structural assumptions and is…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Sarah Perrin , Mathieu Laurière , Julien Pérolat , Matthieu Geist , Romuald Élie , Olivier Pietquin

While multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been proven effective across both collaborative and competitive tasks, existing algorithms often struggle to scale to large populations of agents. Recent advancements in mean-field (MF)…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Bhavini Jeloka , Yue Guan , Panagiotis Tsiotras

Learning in multi-agent systems is highly challenging due to several factors including the non-stationarity introduced by agents' interactions and the combinatorial nature of their state and action spaces. In particular, we consider the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-10 Barna Pásztor , Ilija Bogunovic , Andreas Krause

Agents trained by reinforcement learning (RL) often fail to generalize beyond the environment they were trained in, even when presented with new scenarios that seem similar to the training environment. We study the query complexity required…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Dhruv Malik , Yuanzhi Li , Pradeep Ravikumar

We present a new combined \textit{mean field control game} (MFCG) problem which can be interpreted as a competitive game between collaborating groups and its solution as a Nash equilibrium between groups. Players coordinate their strategies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-16 Andrea Angiuli , Nils Detering , Jean-Pierre Fouque , Mathieu Lauriere , Jimin Lin

We present the development and analysis of a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to solve continuous-space mean field game (MFG) and mean field control (MFC) problems in a unified manner. The proposed approach pairs the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-07 Andrea Angiuli , Jean-Pierre Fouque , Ruimeng Hu , Alan Raydan

In this paper, we study large population multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) in the context of discrete-time linear-quadratic mean-field games (LQ-MFGs). Our setting differs from most existing work on RL for MFGs, in that we consider a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-10-02 Muhammad Aneeq uz Zaman , Kaiqing Zhang , Erik Miehling , Tamer Başar

The recent mean field game (MFG) formalism has enabled the application of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods in large-scale multi-agent systems, with the goal of inferring reward signals that can explain demonstrated behaviours of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Yang Chen , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Shuyue Hu

Mean field type games (MFTGs) describe Nash equilibria between large coalitions: each coalition consists of a continuum of cooperative agents who maximize the average reward of their coalition while interacting non-cooperatively with a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Kai Shao , Jiacheng Shen , Mathieu Laurière

Learning the behavior of large agent populations is an important task for numerous research areas. Although the field of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has made significant progress towards solving these systems, solutions for…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Christian Fabian , Kai Cui , Heinz Koeppl

In this book, we present a curated collection of existing results on inverse problems for Mean Field Games (MFGs), a cutting-edge and rapidly evolving field of research. Our aim is to provide fresh insights, novel perspectives, and a…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-03-20 Hongyu Liu , Catharine W. K. Lo , Shen Zhang

Finite-state mean-field games (MFGs) arise as limits of large interacting particle systems and are governed by an MFG system, a coupled forward-backward differential equation consisting of a forward Kolmogorov-Fokker-Planck (KFP) equation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-16 William Hofgard , Asaf Cohen , Mathieu Laurière

Mean-field reinforcement learning (MF-RL) scales multi-agent RL to large populations by reducing each agent's dependence on others to a single summary statistic -- the mean action. However, this reduction requires every agent to act at…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Shan Yang