stat.MLApr 8, 2026

Gaussian Approximation for Asynchronous Q-learning

Authors: Artemy Rubtsov, Sergey Samsonov, Vladimir Ulyanov, Alexey Naumov

Organizations: HSE University, Moscow, Russia · HSE University & Lomonosov MSU, Moscow, Russia · HSE University & Steklov Mathematical Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

Abstract

In this paper, we derive rates of convergence in the high-dimensional central limit theorem for Polyak-Ruppert averaged iterates generated by the asynchronous Q-learning algorithm with a polynomial stepsize k−ω, ω∈(1/2,1]k^{-ω},\, ω\in (1/2, 1]. Assuming that the sequence of state-action-next-state triples (sk,ak,sk+1)k≥0(s_k, a_k, s_{k+1})_{k \geq 0} forms a uniformly geometrically ergodic Markov chain, we establish a rate of order up to n−1/6log⁡4(nSA)n^{-1/6} \log^{4} (nS A) over the class of hyper-rectangles, where nn is the number of samples used by the algorithm and SS and AA denote the numbers of states and actions, respectively. To obtain this result, we prove a high-dimensional central limit theorem for sums of martingale differences, which may be of independent interest. Finally, we present bounds for high-order moments for the algorithm's last iterate.

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