{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/asyncqvi-asynchronous-parallel-q-value","title":"AsyncQVI: Asynchronous-Parallel Q-Value Iteration for Discounted Markov Decision Processes with Near-Optimal Sample Complexity","arxiv_id":"1812.00885","date":"2018-12-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yibo Zeng","Fei Feng","Wotao Yin"],"abstract":"In this paper, we propose AsyncQVI, an asynchronous-parallel Q-value iteration for discounted Markov decision processes whose transition and reward can only be sampled through a generative model. Given such a problem with $|\\mathcal{S}|$ states, $|\\mathcal{A}|$ actions, and a discounted factor $\\gamma\\in(0,1)$, AsyncQVI uses memory of size $\\mathcal{O}(|\\mathcal{S}|)$ and returns an $\\varepsilon$-optimal policy with probability at least $1-\\delta$ using $$\\tilde{\\mathcal{O}}\\big(\\frac{|\\mathcal{S}||\\mathcal{A}|}{(1-\\gamma)^5\\varepsilon^2}\\log(\\frac{1}{\\delta})\\big)$$ samples. AsyncQVI is also the first asynchronous-parallel algorithm for discounted Markov decision processes that has a sample complexity, which nearly matches the theoretical lower bound. The relatively low memory footprint and parallel ability make AsyncQVI suitable for large-scale applications. In numerical tests, we compare AsyncQVI with four sample-based value iteration methods. The results show that our algorithm is highly efficient and achieves linear parallel speedup.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00885v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.00885v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"asyncqvi-asynchronous-parallel-q-value","repo_url":"https://github.com/uclaopt/AsyncQVI","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}