English

Approachability in Stackelberg Stochastic Games with Vector Costs

Machine Learning 2016-06-22 v3 Computer Science and Game Theory Systems and Control Optimization and Control

Abstract

The notion of approachability was introduced by Blackwell [1] in the context of vector-valued repeated games. The famous Blackwell's approachability theorem prescribes a strategy for approachability, i.e., for `steering' the average cost of a given agent towards a given target set, irrespective of the strategies of the other agents. In this paper, motivated by the multi-objective optimization/decision making problems in dynamically changing environments, we address the approachability problem in Stackelberg stochastic games with vector valued cost functions. We make two main contributions. Firstly, we give a simple and computationally tractable strategy for approachability for Stackelberg stochastic games along the lines of Blackwell's. Secondly, we give a reinforcement learning algorithm for learning the approachable strategy when the transition kernel is unknown. We also recover as a by-product Blackwell's necessary and sufficient condition for approachability for convex sets in this set up and thus a complete characterization. We also give sufficient conditions for non-convex sets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.0728,
  title  = {Approachability in Stackelberg Stochastic Games with Vector Costs},
  author = {Dileep Kalathil and Vivek Borkar and Rahul Jain},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.0728},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

18 Pages, Submitted to Dynamic Games and Applications

R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:46:49.518Z