Related papers: Improvement in Small Progress Measures

Local M-smoothers are interesting and important signal and image processing techniques with many connections to other methods. In our paper we derive a family of partial differential equations (PDEs) that result in one, two, and three…

Least squares approximation is a technique to find an approximate solution to a system of linear equations that has no exact solution. In a typical setting, one lets $n$ be the number of constraints and $d$ be the number of variables, with…

This paper proposes a new mathematical paradigm to analyze discrete-time mean-field games. It is shown that finding Nash equilibrium solutions for a general class of discrete-time mean-field games is equivalent to solving an optimization…

Muller games are played by two players moving a token along a graph; the winner is determined by the set of vertices that occur infinitely often. The central algorithmic problem is to compute the winning regions for the players. Different…

We present an algorithm for minimizing an objective with hard-to-compute gradients by using a related, easier-to-access function as a proxy. Our algorithm is based on approximate proximal point iterations on the proxy combined with…

We study the alternating gradient descent-ascent (AltGDA) algorithm in two-player zero-sum games. Alternating methods, where players take turns to update their strategies, have long been recognized as simple and practical approaches for…

This paper introduces a novel algorithm for two-player deterministic games with perfect information, which we call PROBS (Predict Results of Beam Search). Unlike existing methods that predominantly rely on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for…

An improved exponential time algorithm for Energy Games and Mean Payoff Games has been recently proposed in ICALP 19. The new algorithm prevents some of the repetitive operations performed by the classic value iteration algorithm of Brim et…

Recent applications that arise in machine learning have surged significant interest in solving min-max saddle point games. This problem has been extensively studied in the convex-concave regime for which a global equilibrium solution can be…

Divide and Conquer is a well known algorithmic procedure for solving many kinds of problem. In this procedure, the problem is partitioned into two parts until the problem is trivially solvable. Finding the distance of the closest pair is an…

Deterministic Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) are a mathematical framework for decision-making where the outcomes and future possible actions are deterministically determined by the current action taken. DMDPs can be viewed as a finite…

Stochastic games with discounted payoff, introduced by Shapley, model adversarial interactions in stochastic environments where two players try to optimize a discounted sum of rewards. In this model, long-term weights are geometrically…

In this paper, we provide a generalization of the forward-backward splitting algorithm for minimizing the sum of a proper convex lower semicontinuous function and a differentiable convex function whose gradient satisfies a locally…

We present a new algorithm for solving optimization problems with objective functions that are the sum of a smooth function and a (potentially) nonsmooth regularization function, and nonlinear equality constraints. The algorithm may be…

We propose a deep learning algorithm for high dimensional optimal stopping problems. Our method is inspired by the penalty method for solving free boundary PDEs. Within our approach, the penalized PDE is approximated using the Deep BSDE…

This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…

Diffusion and flow matching have emerged as expressive policy classes in reinforcement learning, but their reliance on multi-step denoising imposes substantial computational overhead at inference time, which is particularly problematic in…

Most existing results about \emph{last-iterate convergence} of learning dynamics are limited to two-player zero-sum games, and only apply under rigid assumptions about what dynamics the players follow. In this paper we provide new results…

We study the minimum backlog problem (MBP). This online problem arises, e.g., in the context of sensor networks. We focus on two main variants of MBP. The discrete MBP is a 2-person game played on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The player is initially…

The convergence of online learning algorithms in games under self-play is a fundamental question in game theory and machine learning. Among various notions of convergence, last-iterate convergence is particularly desirable, as it reflects…