# Single-Loop Federated Actor-Critic across Heterogeneous Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14555/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RL for energy, networks and operations, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 19 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL for energy, networks and operations](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-energy-networks-and-operations/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07481/) (2020)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00444/) (2020)
- [Safe, Multi-Agent, Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.03295/) (2016)
- [Approximation Methods for Bilevel Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02246/) (2018)
- [Fully Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Networked Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08757/) (2018)
- [Finite-Time Error Bounds For Linear Stochastic Approximation and TD Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00923/) (2019)
- [Neural Policy Gradient Methods: Global Optimality and Rates of Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01150/) (2019)
- [A Two-Timescale Framework for Bilevel Optimization: Complexity Analysis and Application to Actor-Critic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05170/) (2020)
- [Federated Reinforcement Learning with Environment Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02634/) (2022)
- [FedNest: Federated Bilevel, Minimax, and Compositional Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02215/) (2022)
- [Fault-Tolerant Federated Reinforcement Learning with Theoretical Guarantee](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14074/) (2021)
- [Finite-time analysis of single-timescale actor-critic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09921/) (2022)
- [When Deep Reinforcement Learning Meets Federated Learning: Intelligent Multi-Timescale Resource Management for Multi-access Edge Computing in 5G Ultra Dense Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10601/) (2020)
- [FedKL: Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Reinforcement Learning by Penalizing KL Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08125/) (2022)
- [Federated Temporal Difference Learning with Linear Function Approximation under Environmental Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02212/) (2023)
- [A Decentralized Policy Gradient Approach to Multi-task Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04338/) (2020)
- [Towards Understanding Asynchronous Advantage Actor-critic: Convergence and Linear Speedup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15511/) (2020)
- [Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Networked Agents: Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03821/) (2019)
- [Achieving Linear Speedup in Non-IID Federated Bilevel Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05412/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated reinforcement learning (FRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling multiple agents to collaborate and learn a shared policy adaptable across heterogeneous environments. Among the various reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, the actor-critic (AC) algorithm stands out for its low variance and high sample efficiency. However, little to nothing is known theoretically about AC in a federated manner, especially each agent interacts with a potentially different environment. The lack of such results is attributed to various technical challenges: a two-level structure illustrating the coupling effect between the actor and the critic, heterogeneous environments, Markovian sampling and multiple local updates. In response, we study textitSingle-loop Federated Actor Critic (SFAC) where agents perform actor-critic learning in a two-level federated manner while interacting with heterogeneous environments. We then provide bounds on the convergence error of SFAC. The results show that the convergence error asymptotically converges to a near-stationary point, with the extent proportional to environment heterogeneity. Moreover, the sample complexity exhibits a linear speed-up through the federation of agents. We evaluate the performance of SFAC through numerical experiments using common RL benchmarks, which demonstrate its effectiveness.