Artificial Intelligence · 10.08.2026, 08:40 UTC
Sub-Quadratic Bisimulation Metrics via Approximate Nearest Neighbors: Coverage-Augmented Guarantees and Computable Two-Sided Certificates
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Artificial Intelligence |
| Quelle | arXiv cs.LG ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 10.08.2026 UTC |
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arXiv:2608.06762v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bisimulation metrics quantify behavioral similarity in Markov decision processes, but their Wasserstein fixed-point operator updates every state pair and incurs quadratic pairwise work. We give a certificate-carrying sub-quadratic method for MDPs with bounded transition support and a useful low-dimensional indexing representation: an approximate-nearest-neighbor index selects the pairs updated by the exact restricted operator, while monotone lower and upper runs enclose the exact metric at every sweep. The main analytical result is a coverage-augmented anytime bound: local index quality alone cannot control global error, because uncovered pairs retain their initialization gap. The limiting error is at most $\max(\rho,\eop/(1-\gamma))$, and with exact covered backups the lower arm satisfies $\|\dann-d\|_\infty=\rho$. Because $\rho$ depends on the unknown exact metric, the algorithm returns the observable sandwich width instead; agreement of the induced lower and upper clusterings certifies exact recovery of the covered aggregation. A reward-oblivious lower bound shows sub-quadratic index-first coverage cannot remove the coverage term, while a separate adaptive lower bound requires $\Omega(|\Scal|)$ pair evaluations. Exact-operator experiments verify the identity and enclosure in every seeded run, and timing experiments recover quadratic versus sub-quadratic scaling under both cheap and full Wasserstein backups. On the grouped $|\Scal|=64$ benchmark, exact restricted refinement reaches the exact-metric skyline once retrieval …