{"paper":{"title":"On the Global Convergence of Policy Gradient in Average Reward Markov Decision Processes","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.SY","eess.SY"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Itai Shufaro, Kfir Y. Levy, Navdeep Kumar, R. Srikant, Shie Mannor, Yashaswini Murthy","submitted_at":"2024-03-11T15:25:03Z","abstract_excerpt":"We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action spaces. Our analysis shows that the policy gradient iterates converge to the optimal policy at a sublinear rate of $O\\left({\\frac{1}{T}}\\right),$ which translates to $O\\left({\\log(T)}\\right)$ regret, where $T$ represents the number of iterations. Prior work on performance bounds for discounted reward MDPs cannot be extended to average reward MDPs because the"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2403.06806","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2403.06806/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}