Pith Number

pith:RAPIYXPD

pith:2026:RAPIYXPD3W32G56UPIHWZUPXH7

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

The Horizon Threshold in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reward-Free Exploration

Idan Barnea, Orin Levy, Yishay Mansour

Setting learning phases equal to the horizon H allows polynomial agents to approximate MDP dynamics in multi-agent reward-free exploration.

arxiv:2602.01453 v3 · 2026-02-01 · cs.LG

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{RAPIYXPD3W32G56UPIHWZUPXH7}

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Record completeness

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

When the number of learning phases equals H, we present a computationally efficient algorithm that uses only Õ(S^6 H^6 A / ε²) agents to obtain an ε approximation of the dynamics (i.e., yields an ε-optimal policy for any reward function). We complement our algorithm with a lower bound showing that any algorithm restricted to ρ < H phases requires at least A^{H/ρ} agents to achieve constant accuracy.

C2weakest assumption

The MDP is tabular and finite-horizon, and the learning proceeds in independent phases where each agent is assigned a policy and executes it without intra-phase communication.

C3one line summary

Θ(H) learning phases are necessary and sufficient for polynomial-agent ε-accurate dynamics estimation in multi-agent reward-free exploration of finite-horizon tabular MDPs.

Cited by

1 paper in Pith

Collaborating in Multi-Armed Bandits with Strategic Agents

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-18T03:09:24.033584Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

881e8c5de3ddb7a377d47a0f6cd1f73fc67feb293447cad0304f97dfb52f3891

Aliases

arxiv: 2602.01453 · arxiv_version: 2602.01453v3 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2602.01453 · pith_short_12: RAPIYXPD3W32 · pith_short_16: RAPIYXPD3W32G56U · pith_short_8: RAPIYXPD

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/RAPIYXPD3W32G56UPIHWZUPXH7 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 881e8c5de3ddb7a377d47a0f6cd1f73fc67feb293447cad0304f97dfb52f3891

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "3d0557f081da79de65c4311622df0fb86b19b47ef16d67a1b66d86da095ae2db",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.LG",
    "submitted_at": "2026-02-01T21:44:11Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "86271ab381b69e0d5f4c664f5e0125f946e799b1753f745e712a834545ba03ba"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2602.01453",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 3
  }
}