Convergence of the deep BSDE method for stochastic control problems formulated through the stochastic maximum principle

It is well-known that decision-making problems from stochastic control can be formulated by means of forward-backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE). Recently, the authors of Ji et al. 2022 proposed an efficient deep learning-based algorithm which was based on the stochastic maximum principle (SMP). In this paper, we provide a convergence result for this deep SMP-BSDE algorithm and compare its performance with other existing methods. In particular, by adopting a similar strategy as in Han and Long 2020, we derive a posteriori error estimate, and show that the total approximation error can be bounded by the value of the loss functional and the discretization error. We present numerical examples for high-dimensional stochastic control problems, both in case of drift- and diffusion control, which showcase superior performance compared to existing algorithms.