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Related papers: Fast Convergence of Regularized Learning in Games

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This paper studies the optimistic variant of Fictitious Play for learning in two-player zero-sum games. While it is known that Optimistic FTRL -- a regularized algorithm with a bounded stepsize parameter -- obtains constant regret in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 John Lazarsfeld , Georgios Piliouras , Ryann Sim , Stratis Skoulakis

Regret matching (RM) -- and its modern variants -- is a foundational online algorithm that has been at the heart of many AI breakthrough results in solving benchmark zero-sum games, such as poker. Yet, surprisingly little is known so far in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Ioannis Anagnostides , Emanuel Tewolde , Brian Hu Zhang , Ioannis Panageas , Vincent Conitzer , Tuomas Sandholm

We examine the problem of regret minimization when the learner is involved in a continuous game with other optimizing agents: in this case, if all players follow a no-regret algorithm, it is possible to achieve significantly lower regret…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Yu-Guan Hsieh , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Volkan Cevher , Panayotis Mertikopoulos

Most of the literature on learning in games has focused on the restrictive setting where the underlying repeated game does not change over time. Much less is known about the convergence of no-regret learning algorithms in dynamic multiagent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Ioannis Anagnostides , Ioannis Panageas , Gabriele Farina , Tuomas Sandholm

Regret Matching+ (RM+) and its variants are important algorithms for solving large-scale games. However, a theoretical understanding of their success in practice is still a mystery. Moreover, recent advances on fast convergence in games are…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Gabriele Farina , Julien Grand-Clément , Christian Kroer , Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo

Regularized learning is a fundamental technique in online optimization, machine learning and many other fields of computer science. A natural question that arises in these settings is how regularized learning algorithms behave when faced…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-09-11 Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Christos Papadimitriou , Georgios Piliouras

Learning in games refers to scenarios where multiple players interact in a shared environment, each aiming to minimize their regret. An equilibrium can be computed at a fast rate of $O(1/T)$ when all players follow the optimistic…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Taira Tsuchiya , Shinji Ito , Haipeng Luo

We consider the setting where players run the Hedge algorithm or its optimistic variant to play an $n$-action game repeatedly for $T$ rounds. 1) For two-player games, we show that the regret of optimistic Hedge decays at $\tilde{O}( 1/T…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Xi Chen , Binghui Peng

We study online learning and equilibrium computation in games with polyhedral decision sets, a property shared by both normal-form games and extensive-form games (EFGs), when the learning agent is restricted to using a best-response oracle.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Darshan Chakrabarti , Gabriele Farina , Christian Kroer

We prove that optimistic-follow-the-regularized-leader (OFTRL), together with smooth value updates, finds an $O(T^{-1})$-approximate Nash equilibrium in $T$ iterations for two-player zero-sum Markov games with full information. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Yuepeng Yang , Cong Ma

We establish the first uncoupled learning algorithm that attains $O(n \log^2 d \log T)$ per-player regret in multi-player general-sum games, where $n$ is the number of players, $d$ is the number of actions available to each player, and $T$…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Ashkan Soleymani , Georgios Piliouras , Gabriele Farina

We consider online learning in multi-player smooth monotone games. Existing algorithms have limitations such as (1) being only applicable to strongly monotone games; (2) lacking the no-regret guarantee; (3) having only asymptotic or slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Yang Cai , Weiqiang Zheng

The study of learning in games has thus far focused primarily on normal form games. In contrast, our understanding of learning in extensive form games (EFGs) and particularly in EFGs with many agents lags far behind, despite them being…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Georgios Piliouras , Lillian Ratliff , Ryann Sim , Stratis Skoulakis

No-regret learning has a long history of being closely connected to game theory. Recent works have devised uncoupled no-regret learning dynamics that, when adopted by all the players in normal-form games, converge to various equilibrium…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Weichao Mao , Haoran Qiu , Chen Wang , Hubertus Franke , Zbigniew Kalbarczyk , Tamer Başar

This paper investigates the sublinear regret guarantees of two non-no-regret algorithms in zero-sum games: Fictitious Play, and Online Gradient Descent with constant stepsizes. In general adversarial online learning settings, both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 John Lazarsfeld , Georgios Piliouras , Ryann Sim , Andre Wibisono

We consider the problem of minimizing a smooth convex function by reducing the optimization to computing the Nash equilibrium of a particular zero-sum convex-concave game. Zero-sum games can be solved using online learning dynamics, where a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-16 Jun-Kun Wang , Jacob Abernethy

Self-play, where the algorithm learns by playing against itself without requiring any direct supervision, has become the new weapon in modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) for achieving superhuman performance in practice. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-10 Yu Bai , Chi Jin

An $\alpha$-potential game is a multi-player non-cooperative interaction in which a global potential function approximates individual player rewards up to a structural bias $\alpha$. While identifying a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in generic…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claire Chen , Yuheng Zhang

We provide several applications of Optimistic Mirror Descent, an online learning algorithm based on the idea of predictable sequences. First, we recover the Mirror Prox algorithm for offline optimization, prove an extension to Holder-smooth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-11-11 Alexander Rakhlin , Karthik Sridharan

Non-ergodic convergence of learning dynamics in games is widely studied recently because of its importance in both theory and practice. Recent work (Cai et al., 2024) showed that a broad class of learning dynamics, including Optimistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yang Cai , Gabriele Farina , Julien Grand-Clément , Christian Kroer , Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Weiqiang Zheng