arXiv:2605.01242cs.LG2026-05中稿 · ICML

提出高效演员-评论家算法,突破低秩MDP的计算瓶颈。

Breaking the Computational Barrier: Provably Efficient Actor-Critic for Low-Rank MDPs

论文配图:Breaking the Computational Barrier: Provably Efficient Actor-Critic for Low-Rank MDPs
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用监督学习替代复杂优化,仅依赖策略评估算子。
  • 理论证明样本效率优于现有方法,无需昂贵规划过程。
  • 适用于真实世界中的近似低秩环境,实验验证有效。

强化学习(RL)是序列决策的基础框架,智能体通过与未知环境交互学习最优策略。在函数逼近场景下,许多现有算法具备良好样本复杂度,但常依赖计算上不可行的算子。本文利用监督学习作为计算代理,揭示了低秩马尔可夫决策过程(MDPs)中常见RL算子的计算层级:若监督学习可高效求解,则策略评估是最高效的算子。基于此,我们提出一种新型乐观演员-评论家算法,仅依赖策略评估算子。理论证明该算法在低秩MDPs上优于现有样本复杂度,且避免了先前工作常见的计算昂贵的规划或优化算子。进一步将结果拓展至近似低秩MDPs,表明其能覆盖广泛的真实世界环境。最后,在多个标准Gym环境中验证了理论结果。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL algorithms achieve favorable sample complexity, but often rely on computationally intractable oracles. In this paper, we use supervised learning as a computational proxy to establish a clear hierarchy of commonly adopted RL oracles under low-rank Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). This hierarchy shows that policy evaluation is the most computationally efficient oracle, provided that supervised learning can be efficiently solved. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel optimistic actor-critic algorithm that relies solely on the policy evaluation oracle. We prove that our algorithm outperforms the existing sample complexity guarantees for low-rank MDPs while avoiding computationally expensive planning or optimization oracles commonly assumed in prior works. We further extend our theoretical results to approximately low-rank MDPs and demonstrate that this setting captures a broad class of real-world environments. Finally, we validate our theoretical results with experiments on several standard Gym environments.

强化学习低秩MDP演员评论家理论分析

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