Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Global Decision Making in the Presence of Local Agents at Scale

Authors: Emile Timothy Anand, Guannan Qu
Primary area: reinforcement learning
Keywords: reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, large-scale systems, mean-field approximation

Abstract:
We study reinforcement learning for global decision-making in the presence of local agents, where the global decision-maker makes decisions affecting all local agents, and the objective is to learn a policy that maximizes the joint rewards of all the agents. Such problems find many applications, e.g. demand response, EV charging, and queueing. In this setting, scalability has been a long-standing challenge due to the size of the joint state space which can be exponential in the number of agents. This work proposes the \texttt{SUBSAMPLE-Q} algorithm, where the global agent subsamples $k\leq n$ local agents to compute a policy in time that is polynomial in $k$. We show that this learned policy converges to the optimal policy on the order of $\tilde{O}(1/\sqrt{k}+\epsilon_{k,m})$ as the number of subsampled agents $k$ increases, where ${\epsilon}_{k,m}$ is the Bellman noise. Finally, we validate our theoretical results through numerical simulations in demand-response and queueing settings.

Decision: reject
Reviewer scores: 5, 5, 5

Reviews and discussion:
<thread>
creation date:
1729902544565

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_kc7o

<content>
summary:
This paper considers a Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning problem where the global agent will make decisions for all local agents. This work proposes SUBSAMPLE-Q algorithm and prove its convergence. The authors also provide simulations to support their result.

strengths:
This paper proposes SUBSAMPLE-Q algorithm to sample $k$ out of $n$ agents to update policy. The authors show that the time is polynomial in $k$. They also provide numerical result to support the finding.

weaknesses:
My primary concern lies with the novelty of this work. The runtime of the approach in the paper is polynomial in $k$, but this comes at the expense of exponential dependence on $|S_l|$. In most of the case, $|S_l|$ is expected to be significantly larger than $k$ and $n$. Therefore, $k^{|S_l|}$ can perform worse than $|S_l|^k$, which suggests the proposed algorithm may not offer any advantages over standard Q-learning.

Additionally, the presentation of this work is poor and leaves several aspects unclear. For instance, the goal of Algorithm 2 is not clear to me. I would suggest the authors clarify the goal in the paragraph before those two algorithms.

Besides, there are lots of typos in this paper, including:

1. In line 110, I think it should be $s^0 \sim d_0$. 

2. In line 204, I think the $\hat{Q}_k$ should be $\hat{Q}^t$. 

3. The third line in algorithm 2 is unfinished. 

4. The notation $\pi_{k,m}$ is introduced in line 220 but the definition of $m$ is not explained until line 249. 

I strongly recommend that the authors carefully review and revise the paper to address these issues.

questions:
Please see my comments in Weakness section.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1730702093712

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_7ebu

<content>
summary:
The authors consider the setting of reinforcement learning in the context of distributed control. That is, a bunch of local agents are governed by a single global agent. The global agent is the only one in power to enact a policy. The state transitions of the local agents are determined by their previous state and the previous state of the global agent. The state transition of the global agent depends on the current state of the global agent and its enacted action. The reward obtained at each iteration is a sum of a global agent reward which depends on the action enacted and the average of the local agent rewards which do not rely on the action. The objective to optimize is the infinite horizon discounted reward. The main bottleneck of these problems is the exponential growth of the state space with the number of local agents. The paper proposes a technique of initially sampling k local agents, to learn their corresponding empirical deterministic optimal policy, and later using random sampling of k agents at each iteration to learn a random optimal policy.

strengths:
1. The problem considered has wide applications across multiple domains such as power grid control, EV logistics planning, queuing system control, etc.

2. The suboptimality scales as $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{k}})+O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{m}})$, where $k$ is the number of local agents sampled at each iteration and $m$ is the number of samples obtained at each iteration to solve for the deterministic optimal policy as a function of $k$.

3. Although they model the agents to be homogeneous for the most part, some heterogeniety is introduced by attaching a type to each agent which is transition invariant.

weaknesses:
1. The total number of samples required for $T$ iterations of the algorithm is $Tm$, where $m$ is required to be large for lower suboptimalities. Moreover, they assume access to a generative model which is quite often an unrealistic assumption.

2. The heterogeniety modelled in the local agents is incredibly mild and the functional aspect of the problem largely treats them as homogeneous.

3. For applications such as queuing control, etc, the average reward is a more meaningful metric, since discounted reward objective doesn't capture stability issues.

4. It is unclear as to what the role of $T$ is in the final bounds (ie Theorem 3.4).

questions:
Please refer above.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1731038614624

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_ksfm

<content>
summary:
The paper considers a setting where there is a global decision making agent and there are many local agents. The paper frame this problem as a MDP problem with a global decision making agent and $n$ local agents. The paper proposes a subsampling based Q learning algorithm named SUBSAMPLE-Q and provide theoretical guarantees for the performance gap between the learned policy and the optimal policy. The paper also provides some numerical simulation experiments.

strengths:
The paper considers a rather interesting RL setting with a global decision maker and local agents. The setting itself is fairly novel to me. 

The theoretical results also seem to be interesting especially making the bound dependent on $k$.

weaknesses:
In assumption 2.1, it assumes state space for local and global agent and the action space — all are finite. Essentially it’s a tabular setting. Given the RL theory these days mostly moved away from tabular setting and at the very minimum considers linear MDP setting (Jin et al 2020), the paper seems to lack generality beyond this finite setting.

The paper is very dense in notation and it’s very difficult to follow. I must add as a disclaimer that, I am not familiar with many of the related literature around this paper. However, even after coming from RL theory background, I found it tiring and difficult to follow the notations and setups. 

The significance of the theoretical result is not clear. I think the paper would benefit more if the significance and importance are highlighted more.

questions:
What would be the main difficulty in setting this problem up in non-tabular setting?
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1731907322394

thread_type:
official_comment

<thread_object>
creator: authors

<content>
title:
Changes in the new version of the paper

comment:
Dear reviewers and ACs,

We extend our deep thanks for the time you devoted to reviewing our manuscript and for the insightful comments and feedback provided. We are happy to hear that the reviewers
- Found our reinforcement learning setting to be interesting and novel in the context of modern applications,
- Found our theoretical bound (namely, the optimality gap of $O(1/\sqrt{k})$ in our subsampling framework) and the faster time complexity of the algorithm to be of interest, and
- Appreciated the numerical simulations to validate the theoretical results. 

The reviewers identified a few weaknesses in our paper:
1) Reviewers kSFM and KC7o raised issues of clarity in our presentation and notation,
2) Reviewer kSFM raised a point on how our result could generalize to the non-tabular setting, and
3) Reviewer KC70 raised an issue that in some parameter regimes, our algorithm may not provide an actual speedup.

In response to these recommendations, we have implemented the following major modifications:

- Per reviewer KSFM and KC7o’s comments, we added a notation table in the Appendix and removed verbiage from the main body, making the notation less dense. Furthermore, we added a more detailed explanation of the purpose of Algorithm 3 (which serves to convert the optimality of the global agent’s action on the subsampled $k$-local-agent system to an approximate optimality on the full system),
- Per reviewer kSFM’s comment, we added Appendix E which extends our work to the non-tabular setting, where the global agent’s and state space can be an infinite (but compact) set, under a general assumption of Linear Bellman completeness, and
- Per reviewer KC70’s comment, we added Algorithm 1 which is a simple reparameterization of Algorithm 2, but is more efficient in the case where each local agent’s state space is large (relative to the number of agents).

We are very grateful for this constructive criticism. They have been crucial in enhancing the quality of the paper. We hope that our revision communicates our work better and addresses your points. Should you have any remaining queries, please do raise them. We are more than willing to provide further clarifications. We deeply value your support and are thankful for your role in furthering research in our field.


Warm regards,

Authors
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1732548005985

thread_type:
official_comment

<thread_object>
creator: authors

<content>
title:
Official Comment by Authors

comment:
We sincerely thank the reviewer for their constructive suggestions and comments. As the deadline approaches, we hope the reviewer will have an opportunity to review our response. If there are any further comments or additional concerns, we would be grateful to address them. Please do not hesitate to let us know if any further clarifications or discussions are needed to assist in the evaluation.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1732828372804

thread_type:
public_comment

<thread_object>
creator: ~sai_advaith_maddipatla1

<content>
comment:
Pros:

- The problem for the global agent appears interesting and is closely related to some other practical control-theory scenarios such as general resource allocation and cooperative path planning.
- The algorithm seems to be especially useful if the global agent does not get complete observability during the execution.

Questions:

- Algorithm 1 works with a fixed sample of local agents (i.e., same agents used in every value iteration), while Algorithm 2 draws a new random sample of local agents for each step. What is the intuition behind this difference, i.e., fixed sample in one case but drawing new samples in the other?
- Does this algorithm extend beyond Q-learning. For example, does this extend to TD learning?
- It is mentioned multiple times in the manuscript that the policy converges to the optimal policy as m \to \infty and k \to n. I'm curious if there is any relevant bound when only one of the previous conditions holds? For example, if only k \to n, then the setting is a sample-deficient estimation of the global agent's Q-function, but if only m \to \infty, is there any relevant idea of what may happen?
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>


Metareview:
metareview:
The paper examines global decision-making in the presence of local agents by leveraging subsampled agents, and provide convergence guarantees as a function of the number of subsampled agents as well as numerical experiments.

The paper consider a fairly novel and interesting decision making setting. However, it is limited by woking in tabular MDPs.
Perhaps the main complaint, which is shared among all the reviewers, is that the paper is quite difficult to follow in terms of concepts and notations.
The presentation of this work is judged to be improvable as several aspects remains unclear.