Mean-Field PhiBE: Continuous-Time Mean-Field Reinforcement Learning from Discrete-Time Data

Abstract

This paper addresses model-free continuous-time mean-field control in a setting where the population dynamics evolve continuously according to an unknown McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equation, while only discrete-time transition data are available. In the model-based formulation, policy evaluation is naturally described by a stationary Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation on $\mathcal P_2(\mathbb R^d)$, but this equation involves the drift and diffusion coefficients of the controlled McKean-Vlasov dynamics, which are not identifiable when only discrete-time data are available. On the other hand, a direct reduction to a time-discrete Bellman equation avoids the non-identifiability issue but loses the differential equation structure. To bridge these two viewpoints, we introduce a Mean-Field-PhiBE (MF-PhiBE), which incorporates discrete-time transition information into a continuous-time PDE on the Wasserstein space. The MF-PhiBE replaces the unknown infinitesimal drift and covariance in the policy-evaluation equation by one-step estimators computed from data, while preserving the generator structure of the McKean-Vlasov HJB equation. We also derive a policy-gradient theorem for entropy-regularized randomized feedback policies, expressing the actor direction through an action-wise infinitesimal advantage and the score of the policy. Combining these two ingredients yields a model-free actor-critic method. We prove a first-order consistency estimate showing that the value induced by an optimal MF-PhiBE policy approximates the optimal continuous-time value with an error of order $Δt$. In the linear-quadratic case, we show our approximation achieves second-order accuracy with only one-step data. Numerical experiments on an LQR benchmark and a crowd-aversion problem illustrate the proposed framework.