Finite-Time Global Optimality Convergence in Deep Neural Actor-Critic Methods for Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Zhiyao Zhang, Myeung Suk Oh, FNU Hairi, Ziyue Luo, Alvaro Velasquez, Jia Liu
Abstract
Actor-critic methods for decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) facilitate collaborative optimal decision making without centralized coordination, thus enabling a wide range of applications in practice. To date, however, most theoretical convergence studies for existing actor-critic decentralized MARL methods are limited to the guarantee of a stationary solution under the linear function approximation. This leaves a significant gap between the highly successful use of deep neural actor-critic for decentralized MARL in practice and the current theoretical understanding. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we make the first attempt to develop a deep neural actor-critic method for decentralized MARL, where both the actor and critic components are inherently non-linear. We show that our proposed method enjoys a global optimality guarantee with a finite-time convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/T)$, where $T$ is the total iteration times. This marks the first global convergence result for deep neural actor-critic methods in the MARL literature. We also conduct extensive numerical experiments, which verify our theoretical results.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
zhang2025finitetime,
title={Finite-Time Global Optimality Convergence in Deep Neural Actor-Critic Methods for Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning},
author={Zhiyao Zhang and Myeung Suk Oh and FNU Hairi and Ziyue Luo and Alvaro Velasquez and Jia Liu},
booktitle={Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=ZcvGJH4ps7}
}