Title:Second-Order Smooth Planning with Optimal-Transport Bellman Smoothing

Abstract:Planning with a generative model aims to estimate the value of a state using as few simulator calls as possible. SmoothCruiser achieves problem-independent complexity $\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-4})$ by exploiting the smoothness of the entropy-regularized Bellman backup, but its estimator is only first-order. We show that the sample-complexity exponent of SmoothCruiser-type planners is governed by the order $\beta$ of the local Taylor remainder, giving oracle complexity $\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-(2+2/(\beta-1))})$: the first-order case $\beta=2$ recovers SmoothCruiser, while a second-order/cubic remainder $\beta=3$ yields $\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-3})$. We reach this regime with an optimal-transport-smoothed Bellman backup over action distributions, which has a closed form, a policy gradient, and a Lipschitz Hessian, and whose quadratic correction admits an unbiased cross-product estimator. The resulting SecondOrderSmoothCruiser achieves $\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ oracle complexity for fixed OT parameters, and we relate the OT, entropy-regularized, and unregularized objectives through explicit regularization-bias bounds.

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