Agnostic Q-learning with Function Approximation in Deterministic Systems: Tight Bounds on Approximation Error and Sample Complexity

The current paper studies the problem of agnostic $Q$-learning with function approximation in deterministic systems where the optimal $Q$-function is approximable by a function in the class $\mathcal{F}$ with approximation error $δ\ge 0$. We propose a novel recursion-based algorithm and show that if $δ= O\left(ρ/\sqrt{\dim_E}\right)$, then one can find the optimal policy using $O\left(\dim_E\right)$ trajectories, where $ρ$ is the gap between the optimal $Q$-value of the best actions and that of the second-best actions and $\dim_E$ is the Eluder dimension of $\mathcal{F}$. Our result has two implications: 1) In conjunction with the lower bound in [Du et al., ICLR 2020], our upper bound suggests that the condition $δ= \widetildeΘ\left(ρ/\sqrt{\mathrm{dim}_E}\right)$ is necessary and sufficient for algorithms with polynomial sample complexity. 2) In conjunction with the lower bound in [Wen and Van Roy, NIPS 2013], our upper bound suggests that the sample complexity $\widetildeΘ\left(\mathrm{dim}_E\right)$ is tight even in the agnostic setting. Therefore, we settle the open problem on agnostic $Q$-learning proposed in [Wen and Van Roy, NIPS 2013]. We further extend our algorithm to the stochastic reward setting and obtain similar results.

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