# Last-Iterate Convergence for Constrained MDPs: From Dual Descent to Primal-Dual

**Authors:** Michael Lu, Max Qiushi Lin, Mo Chen, Sharan Vaswani  
**Lab:** Simon Fraser University · **Published:** 29 Oct 2026  
**Links:** [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39524) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.39524) · [This page](https://omen-bit.github.io/ai-paper-daily/paper/2610.39524.html)

## Abstract

We study policy optimization for infinite-horizon, discounted constrained Markov decision processes. While primal-dual (ttPD) methods are widely used in practice, their theoretical guarantees typically hold for an impractical mixture policy. In contrast, dual descent (ttDD) methods output a single policy ("last iterate") with guarantees on its performance. However, such methods require iteratively solving entropy-regularized MDPs in an inner-loop, limiting their practical effectiveness. Moreover, existing analyses rely on strong coverage assumptions that are difficult to satisfy in practice. Consequently, we first provide a new analysis of ttDD methods that does not require coverage assumptions. We then employ entropy-regularized natural policy gradient and dual regularization to eliminate the inner loop, resulting in an efficient ttPD algorithm. We develop a novel tracking analysis which shows that, compared to existing methods, the proposed algorithm achieves improved last-iterate convergence guarantees. Furthermore, our theoretical framework allows us to analyze a truncated bilevel method that interpolates between ttDD and ttPD methods. Finally, we generalize our analysis to handle linear function approximation. Compared to prior last-iterate methods, we prove stronger guarantees under less restrictive assumptions.

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