  This paper presents a general mean-field game (GMFG) framework for
simultaneous learning and decision-making in stochastic games with a large
population. It first establishes the existence of a unique Nash Equilibrium to
this GMFG, and demonstrates that naively combining reinforcement learning with
the fixed-point approach in classical MFGs yields unstable algorithms. It then
proposes value-based and policy-based reinforcement learning algorithms (GMF-V
and GMF-P, respectively) with smoothed policies, with analysis of their
convergence properties and computational complexities. Experiments on an
equilibrium product pricing problem demonstrate that GMF-V-Q and GMF-P-TRPO,
two specific instantiations of GMF-V and GMF-P, respectively, with Q-learning
and TRPO, are both efficient and robust in the GMFG setting. Moreover, their
performance is superior in convergence speed, accuracy, and stability when
compared with existing algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning in the
$N$-player setting.
