Optimality of Symmetric Independent Policies under Decentralized Mean-Field Information Sharing for Stochastic Teams and Equivalence with McKean-Vlasov Control of a Representative Agent

Sina Sanjari; Naci Saldi; Serdar Yüksel

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2404.04957

Optimality of Symmetric Independent Policies under Decentralized Mean-Field Information Sharing for Stochastic Teams and Equivalence with McKean-Vlasov Control of a Representative Agent

Sina Sanjari·Naci Saldi·Serdar Yüksel

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We study a class of stochastic exchangeable teams with a finite number of decision makers (DMs) as well as their mean-field limits with infinitely many DMs. In the finite population regime, we study exchangeable teams under the centralized information structure. The paper makes the following main contributions: i) For finite population exchangeable teams, we establish the existence of an optimal policy that is exchangeable (permutation invariant) and Markovian; ii) As our main result in the paper, we show that a sequence of exchangeable optimal policies for finite population settings (which satisfies a measure valued MDP formulation due to B{ä}uerle) converges to a decentralized symmetric (identical) and conditionally independent (given the mean-field) policy for the infinite population problem, which is then globally optimal under both the centralized information structure as well as the mean-field sharing information structure. (iii) This result establishes existence of a symmetric, independent, decentralized optimal randomized policy for the infinite population problem and proves the optimality of the limiting measure-valued MDP for the representative DM. Our paper thus establishes the relation between the controlled McKean-Vlasov dynamics and the optimal infinite population decentralized stochastic control problem (without an apriori restriction of symmetry in policies of individual agents), for the first time, to our knowledge (beyond several special cases). We also establish near optimality of a numerical method for solving this problem. iv) Finally, we show that symmetric, independent, decentralized optimal randomized policies are approximately optimal for the corresponding finite-population team with a large number of DMs under the centralized information structure.

Explore related subjects

math.OC

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Sina Sanjari, Naci Saldi, Serdar Yüksel. 2026-06-05. Optimality of Symmetric Independent Policies under Decentralized Mean-Field Information Sharing for Stochastic Teams and Equivalence with McKean-Vlasov Control of a Representative Agent. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04957

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Genericity of Polyak-Lojasiewicz Inequalities for Entropic Mean-Field Neural ODEs

We address the behavior of idealized deep residual neural networks (ResNets), modeled via an optimal control problem set over continuity (or adjoint transport) equations. The continuity equations describe the statistical evolution of the features in the asymptotic regime where the layers of the network form a continuum. The velocity field is expressed through the network activation function, which is itself viewed as a function of the statistical distribution of the network parameters (weights and biases). From a mathematical standpoint, the control is interpreted in a relaxed sense, taking values in the space of probability measures over the set of parameters. We investigate the optimal behavior of the network when the cost functional arises from a regression problem and includes an additional entropic regularization term on the distribution of the parameters. In this framework, we focus in particular on the existence of stable optimizers --that is, optimizers at which the Hessian of the cost is non-degenerate. We show that, for an open and dense set of initial data, understood here as probability distributions over features and associated labels, there exists a unique stable global minimizer of the control problem. Moreover, we show that such minimizers satisfy a local Polyak--Lojasiewicz inequality, which can lead to exponential convergence of the corresponding gradient descent when the initialization lies sufficiently close to the optimal parameters. This result thus demonstrates the genericity (with respect to the distribution of features and labels) of the Polyak--Lojasiewicz condition in ResNets with a continuum of layers and under entropic penalization.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

A regret minimization approach to fixed-point iterations

We propose a conversion scheme that turns regret minimizing algorithms into fixed point iterations, with convergence guarantees following from regret bounds. The resulting iterations can be seen as a grand extension of the classical Krasnoselskii--Mann iterations, as the latter are recovered by converting the Online Gradient Descent algorithm. This approach yields new simple iterations for finding fixed points of non-self operators. We also focus on converting algorithms from the AdaGrad family of regret minimizers, and thus obtain fixed point iterations with adaptive guarantees of a new kind. Numerical experiments on various problems demonstrate faster convergence of AdaGrad-based fixed point iterations over Krasnoselskii--Mann iterations.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Variational Analysis in Spectral Decomposition Systems

This work is concerned with the variational analysis of functions defined on Euclidean spaces whose values depend solely on certain invariants (``spectrum'') of their arguments, a class we term ``spectral functions.'' Building on our previous work \cite{PartI} on the convex analysis of such functions, we work in the abstract framework of spectral decomposition systems, which covers a wide range of previously studied settings, including eigenvalue decomposition of Hermitian matrices and singular value decomposition of rectangular matrices, and allows the derivation of new results in more general settings such as normal decomposition systems. The main results of this work provide constructive formulae for computing the regular, limiting, and Clarke subdifferentials of a spectral function in terms of the corresponding objects of the associated invariant function. Finally, we obtain a generalization of Lidski\uı's theorem on the spectrum of additive perturbations of Hermitian matrices to arbitrary spectral decomposition systems.

math.OC↗