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Since Polyak's pioneering work, heavy ball (HB) momentum has been widely studied in minimization. However, its role in min-max games remains largely unexplored. As a key component of practical min-max algorithms like Adam, this gap limits…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yi Feng , Kaito Fujii , Stratis Skoulakis , Xiao Wang , Volkan Cevher

Despite the growing prominence of generative adversarial networks (GANs), optimization in GANs is still a poorly understood topic. In this paper, we analyze the "gradient descent" form of GAN optimization i.e., the natural setting where we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-16 Vaishnavh Nagarajan , J. Zico Kolter

Dynamic games arise when multiple agents with differing objectives choose control inputs to a dynamic system. Dynamic games model a wide variety of applications in economics, defense, and energy systems. However, compared to single-agent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-25 Bolei Di , Andrew Lamperski

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a novel approach to generative modelling, a task whose goal it is to learn a distribution of real data points. They have often proved difficult to train: GANs are unlike many techniques in machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-02 Samuel A. Barnett

We study online optimization methods for zero-sum games, a fundamental problem in adversarial learning in machine learning, economics, and many other domains. Traditional methods approximate Nash equilibria (NE) using either regret-based…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Taemin Kim , James P. Bailey

Generative Adversarial Networks are notoriously challenging to train. The underlying minmax optimization is highly susceptible to the variance of the stochastic gradient and the rotational component of the associated game vector field. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-24 Tatjana Chavdarova , Matteo Pagliardini , Sebastian U. Stich , Francois Fleuret , Martin Jaggi

Several recent works in online optimization and game dynamics have established strong negative complexity results including the formal emergence of instability and chaos even in small such settings, e.g., $2\times 2$ games. These results…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-13 Georgios Piliouras , Xiao Wang

Zero-sum games are a fundamental setting for adversarial training and decision-making in multi-agent learning (MAL). Existing methods often ensure convergence to (approximate) Nash equilibria by introducing a form of regularization. Yet,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Tuo Zhang , Leonardo Stella

This paper deals with a network of computing agents aiming to solve an online optimization problem in a distributed fashion, i.e., by means of local computation and communication, without any central coordinator. We propose the gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-13 Guido Carnevale , Francesco Farina , Ivano Notarnicola , Giuseppe Notarstefano

We consider the problem of training generative models with a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Although GANs can accurately model complex distributions, they are known to be difficult to train due to instabilities caused by a difficult…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-13 Paulina Grnarova , Kfir Y. Levy , Aurelien Lucchi , Thomas Hofmann , Andreas Krause

Multi-objective optimization problems, which require the simultaneous optimization of multiple objectives, are prevalent across numerous applications. Existing multi-objective optimization methods often rely on manually-tuned aggregation…

Graphics · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ziyu Zhang , Sergey Bashkirov , Dun Yang , Yi Shi , Michael Taylor , Xue Bin Peng

Among the research topics in multi-agent learning, mixed-motive cooperation is one of the most prominent challenges, primarily due to the mismatch between individual and collective goals. The cutting-edge research is focused on…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Yang Li , Wenhao Zhang , Jianhong Wang , Shao Zhang , Yali Du , Ying Wen , Wei Pan

The vast majority of modern deep learning models are trained with momentum-based first-order optimizers. The momentum term governs the optimizer's memory by determining how much each past gradient contributes to the current convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Kristi Topollai , Anna Choromanska

Both generative adversarial networks (GAN) in unsupervised learning and actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning (RL) have gained a reputation for being difficult to optimize. Practitioners in both fields have amassed a large number…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-19 David Pfau , Oriol Vinyals

We study the problem of computing an approximate Nash equilibrium of a game whose strategy space is continuous without access to gradients of the utility function. Such games arise, for example, when players' strategies are represented by…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Carlos Martin , Tuomas Sandholm

Despite the success of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in generating visually appealing images, they are notoriously challenging to train. In order to stabilize the learning dynamics in minimax games, we propose a novel recursive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Zichu Liu , Lacra Pavel

Last-iterate behaviors of learning algorithms in repeated two-player zero-sum games have been extensively studied due to their wide applications in machine learning and related tasks. Typical algorithms that exhibit the last-iterate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yi Feng , Ping Li , Ioannis Panageas , Xiao Wang

Multi-agent reinforcement learning in mixed-motive settings presents a fundamental challenge: agents must balance individual interests with collective goals, which are neither fully aligned nor strictly opposed. To address this, reward…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Woojun Kim , Katia Sycara

Smooth minimax games often proceed by simultaneous or alternating gradient updates. Although algorithms with alternating updates are commonly used in practice, the majority of existing theoretical analyses focus on simultaneous algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Guodong Zhang , Yuanhao Wang , Laurent Lessard , Roger Grosse

We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-24 Hailiang Liu , Xuping Tian