Provably Efficient Policy Optimization for Two-Player Zero-Sum Markov Games

Abstract

Policy-based methods with function approximation are widely used for solving two-player zero-sum games with large state and/or action spaces. However, it remains elusive how to obtain optimization and statistical guarantees for such algorithms. We present a new policy optimization algorithm with function approximation and prove that under standard regularity conditions on the Markov game and the function approximation class, our algorithm finds a near-optimal policy within a polynomial number of samples and iterations. To our knowledge, this is the first provably efficient policy optimization algorithm with function approximation that solves two-player zero-sum Markov games.