Fast Rates for Offline Q-Learning with KL Regularization

Özetle: This paper investigates offline Q-learning for finite-horizon Markov decision processes with Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization.

Özet

This paper investigates offline Q-learning for finite-horizon Markov decision processes with Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization. Recent studies have shown that KL regularization can yield fast rates in offline decision-making problems. However, it remains unclear whether Q-learning, which adopts incremental stochastic approximation updates, can achieve such fast rates in the offline setting. We first propose KL-regularized Q-Learning (KLQ), a simple variant of classical Q-learning. By exploiting KL regularization, we prove that KLQ achieves a sample complexity of $widetilde{O}(1/ε)$ without explicit pessimism. This guarantee, however, has an exponential dependence on the KL regularization parameter and the horizon. To address this limitation, we further propose KL-regularized Pessimistic Q-Learning (KLPQ), which incorporates pessimism into KLQ. We prove that KLPQ retains the same (widetilde O(1/ε)) rate while removing the explicit exponential dependence, thereby further improving the sample complexity. To the best of our knowledge, these results establish the first fast-rate guarantees for offline Q-learning in tabular finite-horizon KL-regularized MDPs.

Orijinal Özet (İngilizce)

This paper investigates offline Q-learning for finite-horizon Markov decision processes with Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization. Recent studies have shown that KL regularization can yield fast rates in offline decision-making problems. However, it remains unclear whether Q-learning, which adopts incremental stochastic approximation updates, can achieve such fast rates in the offline setting. We first propose KL-regularized Q-Learning (KLQ), a simple variant of classical Q-learning. By exploiting KL regularization, we prove that KLQ achieves a sample complexity of $widetilde{O}(1/ε)$ without explicit pessimism. This guarantee, however, has an exponential dependence on the KL regularization parameter and the horizon. To address this limitation, we further propose KL-regularized Pessimistic Q-Learning (KLPQ), which incorporates pessimism into KLQ. We prove that KLPQ retains the same (widetilde O(1/ε)) rate while removing the explicit exponential dependence, thereby further improving the sample complexity. To the best of our knowledge, these results establish the first fast-rate guarantees for offline Q-learning in tabular finite-horizon KL-regularized MDPs.

Kaynak: arXiv:2610.18839 · PDF