Non-Exchangeable Mean Field Markov Decision Processes with common noise : from Bellman equation to quantitative propagation of chaos}
Abstract
We study infinite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a continuum of heterogeneous agents interacting through a common noise, without assuming exchangeability. We introduce the framework of Conditional Non-Exchangeable Mean Field MDPs (CNEMF-MDPs) in both a strong formulation and a label-state formulation. We establish the equivalence between these two formulations by showing that the control problem can be lifted to a standard MDP defined on the Wasserstein space P λ (I ×X ), where I denotes the label (heterogeneity) space, X is the individual state space, and λ specifies the fixed distribution of agent labels. Within this framework, we characterize the value function as the unique fixed point of an appropriate Bellman operator acting on P λ (I × X ). Our second contribution is a quantitative analysis of the propagation of chaos for this non-exchangeable setting with common noise. We derive sharp finite-population bounds by comparing the Bellman operator of the finite N -agent MDP, defined on the high-dimensional space X N , with its infinite-agent counterpart. This comparison yields explicit constructions of near-optimal policies for the N -agent system from -optimal policies of the limiting CNEMF-MDP.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Stochastic processes and financial applications
Adaptive Dynamic Programming Control
Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics
Publication details
- Journal / source
- HAL
- Publication date
- 1 January 2026
- Language
- EN
- Document type
- Preprint