Parameter-Free Federated TD Learning with Markov Noise in Heterogeneous Environments

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Naskar, Ankur, Thoppe, Gugan, Negi, Utsav, Gupta, Vijay
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Naskar, Ankur
Thoppe, Gugan
Negi, Utsav
Gupta, Vijay
author_facet Naskar, Ankur
Thoppe, Gugan
Negi, Utsav
Gupta, Vijay
contents Federated learning (FL) can dramatically speed up reinforcement learning by distributing exploration and training across multiple agents. It can guarantee an optimal convergence rate that scales linearly in the number of agents, i.e., a rate of $\tilde{O}(1/(NT)),$ where $T$ is the iteration index and $N$ is the number of agents. However, when the training samples arise from a Markov chain, existing results on TD learning achieving this rate require the algorithm to depend on unknown problem parameters. We close this gap by proposing a two-timescale Federated Temporal Difference (FTD) learning with Polyak-Ruppert averaging. Our method provably attains the optimal $\tilde{O}(1/NT)$ rate in both average-reward and discounted settings--offering a parameter-free FTD approach for Markovian data. Although our results are novel even in the single-agent setting, they apply to the more realistic and challenging scenario of FL with heterogeneous environments.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Parameter-Free Federated TD Learning with Markov Noise in Heterogeneous Environments
Naskar, Ankur
Thoppe, Gugan
Negi, Utsav
Gupta, Vijay
Machine Learning
Federated learning (FL) can dramatically speed up reinforcement learning by distributing exploration and training across multiple agents. It can guarantee an optimal convergence rate that scales linearly in the number of agents, i.e., a rate of $\tilde{O}(1/(NT)),$ where $T$ is the iteration index and $N$ is the number of agents. However, when the training samples arise from a Markov chain, existing results on TD learning achieving this rate require the algorithm to depend on unknown problem parameters. We close this gap by proposing a two-timescale Federated Temporal Difference (FTD) learning with Polyak-Ruppert averaging. Our method provably attains the optimal $\tilde{O}(1/NT)$ rate in both average-reward and discounted settings--offering a parameter-free FTD approach for Markovian data. Although our results are novel even in the single-agent setting, they apply to the more realistic and challenging scenario of FL with heterogeneous environments.
title Parameter-Free Federated TD Learning with Markov Noise in Heterogeneous Environments
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07436