Stability and Generalization for Bellman Residuals

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Kang, Enoch H., Jang, Kyoungseok
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866909999487254528
author Kang, Enoch H.
Jang, Kyoungseok
author_facet Kang, Enoch H.
Jang, Kyoungseok
contents Offline reinforcement learning and offline inverse reinforcement learning aim to recover near-optimal value functions or reward models from a fixed batch of logged trajectories, yet current practice still struggles to enforce Bellman consistency. Bellman residual minimization (BRM) has emerged as an attractive remedy, as a globally convergent stochastic gradient descent-ascent based method for BRM has been recently discovered. However, its statistical behavior in the offline setting remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we close this statistical gap. Our analysis introduces a single Lyapunov potential that couples SGDA runs on neighbouring datasets and yields an O(1/n) on-average argument-stability bound-doubling the best known sample-complexity exponent for convex-concave saddle problems. The same stability constant translates into the O(1/n) excess risk bound for BRM, without variance reduction, extra regularization, or restrictive independence assumptions on minibatch sampling. The results hold for standard neural-network parameterizations and minibatch SGD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_18741
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stability and Generalization for Bellman Residuals
Kang, Enoch H.
Jang, Kyoungseok
Machine Learning
Offline reinforcement learning and offline inverse reinforcement learning aim to recover near-optimal value functions or reward models from a fixed batch of logged trajectories, yet current practice still struggles to enforce Bellman consistency. Bellman residual minimization (BRM) has emerged as an attractive remedy, as a globally convergent stochastic gradient descent-ascent based method for BRM has been recently discovered. However, its statistical behavior in the offline setting remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we close this statistical gap. Our analysis introduces a single Lyapunov potential that couples SGDA runs on neighbouring datasets and yields an O(1/n) on-average argument-stability bound-doubling the best known sample-complexity exponent for convex-concave saddle problems. The same stability constant translates into the O(1/n) excess risk bound for BRM, without variance reduction, extra regularization, or restrictive independence assumptions on minibatch sampling. The results hold for standard neural-network parameterizations and minibatch SGD.
title Stability and Generalization for Bellman Residuals
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18741