Related papers: Strategy Derivation for Small Progress Measures
Classical objectives in two-player zero-sum games played on graphs often deal with limit behaviors of infinite plays: e.g., mean-payoff and total-payoff in the quantitative setting, or parity in the qualitative one (a canonical way to…
In a recent breakthrough, Paz and Schwartzman (SODA'17) presented a single-pass ($2+\epsilon$)-approximation algorithm for the maximum weight matching problem in the semi-streaming model. Their algorithm uses $O(n\log^2 n)$ bits of space,…
Strategy iteration is a technique frequently used for two-player games in order to determine the winner or compute payoffs, but to the best of our knowledge no general framework for strategy iteration has been considered. Inspired by…
Learning in stochastic games is a notoriously difficult problem because, in addition to each other's strategic decisions, the players must also contend with the fact that the game itself evolves over time, possibly in a very complicated…
We focus on the design of algorithms for finding equilibria in 2-player zero-sum games. Although it is well known that such problems can be solved by a single linear program, there has been a surge of interest in recent years for simpler…
Mean field inference in probabilistic models is generally a highly nonconvex problem. Existing optimization methods, e.g., coordinate ascent algorithms, can only generate local optima. In this work we propose provable mean filed methods for…
A path from s to t on a polyhedral terrain is descending if the height of a point p never increases while we move p along the path from s to t. No efficient algorithm is known to find a shortest descending path (SDP) from s to t in a…
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) are a fundamental class of optimization problems with important recent applications in approximation algorithms, quantum complexity, robust learning, algorithmic rounding, and adversarial deep learning. This…
A Subtraction-Division game is a two player combinatorial game with three parameters: a set S, a set D, and a number n. The game starts at n, and is a race to say the number 1. Each player, on their turn, can either move the total to n-s…
We study parity games in which one of the two players controls only a small number $k$ of nodes and the other player controls the $n-k$ other nodes of the game. Our main result is a fixed-parameter algorithm that solves bipartite parity…
Parity games are simple infinite games played on finite graphs with a winning condition that is expressive enough to capture nested least and greatest fixpoints. Through their tight relationship to the modal mu-calculus, they are used in…
We consider distributed optimization under communication constraints for training deep learning models. We propose a new algorithm, whose parameter updates rely on two forces: a regular gradient step, and a corrective direction dictated by…
2.5 player parity games combine the challenges posed by 2.5 player reachability games and the qualitative analysis of parity games. These two types of problems are best approached with different types of algorithms: strategy improvement…
This paper investigates value function approximation in the context of zero-sum Markov games, which can be viewed as a generalization of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework to the two-agent case. We generalize error bounds from MDPs…
We study infinite-horizon Discounted Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) under a generative model. Motivated by the Algorithm with Advice framework Mitzenmacher and Vassilvitskii 2022, we propose a novel framework to investigate how a…
We present a novel method to compute \emph{permissive winning strategies} in two-player games over finite graphs with $ \omega $-regular winning conditions. Given a game graph $G$ and a parity winning condition $\Phi$, we compute a…
We present a general framework of designing efficient dynamic approximate algorithms for optimization on undirected graphs. In particular, we develop a technique that, given any problem that admits a certain notion of vertex sparsifiers,…
We present a novel, practical, and provable approach for solving diagonally constrained semi-definite programming (SDP) problems at scale using accelerated non-convex programming. Our algorithm non-trivially combines acceleration motions…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
Solving time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) that exhibit sharp gradients or local singularities is computationally demanding, as traditional physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) often suffer from inefficient point…