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Self-play via online learning is one of the premier ways to solve large-scale two-player zero-sum games, both in theory and practice. Particularly popular algorithms include optimistic multiplicative weights update (OMWU) and optimistic…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Yang Cai , Gabriele Farina , Julien Grand-Clément , Christian Kroer , Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Weiqiang Zheng

Global minimization is a fundamental challenge in optimization, especially in machine learning, where finding the global minimum of a function directly impacts model performance and convergence. This article introduces a novel optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Seifeddine Achour

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

This paper considers the decentralized convex optimization problem, which has a wide range of applications in large-scale machine learning, sensor networks, and control theory. We propose novel algorithms that achieve optimal computation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Haishan Ye , Luo Luo , Ziang Zhou , Tong Zhang

We generalize gradient descent with momentum for optimization in differentiable games to have complex-valued momentum. We give theoretical motivation for our method by proving convergence on bilinear zero-sum games for simultaneous and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Jonathan Lorraine , David Acuna , Paul Vicol , David Duvenaud

Zero-sum and non-zero-sum (aka general-sum) games are relevant in a wide range of applications. While general non-zero-sum games are computationally hard, researchers focus on the special class of monotone games for gradient-based…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ruichen Luo , Sebastian U. Stich , Krishnendu Chatterjee

The constrained gradient method (CGM) has recently been proposed to solve convex optimization and monotone variational inequality (VI) problems with general functional constraints. While existing literature has established convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-24 Danqing Zhou , Hongmei Chen , Shiqian Ma , Junfeng Yang

We introduce a new algorithm for the numerical computation of Nash equilibria of competitive two-player games. Our method is a natural generalization of gradient descent to the two-player setting where the update is given by the Nash…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-02 Florian Schäfer , Anima Anandkumar

We study the problem of convergence to a stationary point in zero-sum games. We propose competitive gradient optimization (CGO ), a gradient-based method that incorporates the interactions between the two players in zero-sum games for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-31 Abhijeet Vyas , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

Games generalize the single-objective optimization paradigm by introducing different objective functions for different players. Differentiable games often proceed by simultaneous or alternating gradient updates. In machine learning, games…

In decision-dependent games, multiple players optimize their decisions under a data distribution that shifts with their joint actions, creating complex dynamics in applications like market pricing. A practical consequence of these dynamics…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Guangzheng Zhong , Yang Liu , Jiming Liu

We show by counterexample that policy-gradient algorithms have no guarantees of even local convergence to Nash equilibria in continuous action and state space multi-agent settings. To do so, we analyze gradient-play in N-player general-sum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-18 Eric Mazumdar , Lillian J. Ratliff , Michael I. Jordan , S. Shankar Sastry

In this paper, we propose a provably convergent and practical framework for multi-objective reinforcement learning with max-min criterion. From a game-theoretic perspective, we reformulate max-min multi-objective reinforcement learning as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Woohyeon Byeon , Giseung Park , Jongseong Chae , Amir Leshem , Youngchul Sung

A subgradient method is presented for solving general convex optimization problems, the main requirement being that a strictly-feasible point is known. A feasible sequence of iterates is generated, which converges to within user-specified…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-30 James Renegar

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Michail Fasoulakis , Evangelos Markakis , Giorgos Roussakis , Christodoulos Santorinaios

Motivated by applications in Optimization, Game Theory, and the training of Generative Adversarial Networks, the convergence properties of first order methods in min-max problems have received extensive study. It has been recognized that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-29 Constantinos Daskalakis , Ioannis Panageas

For strongly convex objectives that are smooth, the classical theory of gradient descent ensures linear convergence relative to the number of gradient evaluations. An analogous nonsmooth theory is challenging. Even when the objective is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-19 X. Y. Han , Adrian S. Lewis

A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Difan Zou , Quanquan Gu

We prove that, for finite-arm bandits with linear function approximation, the global convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods depends on inter-related properties between the policy update and the representation. textcolor{blue}{First},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Jincheng Mei , Bo Dai , Alekh Agarwal , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Csaba Szepesvari , Dale Schuurmans

Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-14 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He , Guanghui Lan , Florian Wolf