Fast Regularized Policy Mirror Descent with One-Step TD Updates

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.39837v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policy mirror descent (PMD) enjoys fast convergence in regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs), but existing guarantees often rely on exact or increasingly accurate policy evaluation. We analyze PMD coupled with a persistent critic advanced by one temporal-difference (TD) update. For finite discounted MDPs, we establish global linear convergence in value for exact coordinate-wise Bellman updates, with any positive constant actor stepsize and a