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Gaussian Approximation for Asynchronous Q-learning

Machine Learning 2026-04-09 v1 Machine Learning Probability

Abstract

In this paper, we derive rates of convergence in the high-dimensional central limit theorem for Polyak-Ruppert averaged iterates generated by the asynchronous Q-learning algorithm with a polynomial stepsize kω,ω(1/2,1]k^{-\omega},\, \omega \in (1/2, 1]. Assuming that the sequence of state-action-next-state triples (sk,ak,sk+1)k0(s_k, a_k, s_{k+1})_{k \geq 0} forms a uniformly geometrically ergodic Markov chain, we establish a rate of order up to n1/6log4(nSA)n^{-1/6} \log^{4} (nS A) over the class of hyper-rectangles, where nn is the number of samples used by the algorithm and SS and AA denote the numbers of states and actions, respectively. To obtain this result, we prove a high-dimensional central limit theorem for sums of martingale differences, which may be of independent interest. Finally, we present bounds for high-order moments for the algorithm's last iterate.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.07323,
  title  = {Gaussian Approximation for Asynchronous Q-learning},
  author = {Artemy Rubtsov and Sergey Samsonov and Vladimir Ulyanov and Alexey Naumov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.07323},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

41 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:59:41.968Z