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We introduce a contractive abstract dynamic programming framework and related policy iteration algorithms, specifically designed for sequential zero-sum games and minimax problems with a general structure. Aside from greater generality, the…
Richman games are zero-sum games, where in each turn players bid in order to determine who will play next [Lazarus et al.'99]. We extend the theory to impartial general-sum two player games called \emph{bidding games}, showing the existence…
Bilinear dynamical systems are ubiquitous in many different domains and they can also be used to approximate more general control-affine systems. This motivates the problem of learning bilinear systems from a single trajectory of the…
Symmetry is inherent in the definition of most of the two-player zero-sum games, including parity, mean-payoff, and discounted-payoff games. It is therefore quite surprising that no symmetric analysis techniques for these games exist. We…
We consider differentiable games where the goal is to find a Nash equilibrium. The machine learning community has recently started using variants of the gradient method (GD). Prime examples are extragradient (EG), the optimistic gradient…
A combinatorial simplex algorithm is an instance of the simplex method in which the pivoting depends on combinatorial data only. We show that any algorithm of this kind admits a tropical analogue which can be used to solve mean payoff…
Infinitely repeated games can support cooperative outcomes that are not equilibria in the one-shot game. The idea is to make sure that any gains from deviating will be offset by retaliation in future rounds. However, this model of…
In this paper, we present a generic framework to extend existing uniformly optimal convex programming algorithms to solve more general nonlinear, possibly nonconvex, optimization problems. The basic idea is to incorporate a local search…
In this paper, using variational approaches, we investigate the first order planning problem arising in the theory of mean field games. We show the existence and uniqueness of weak solutions of the problem in the case of a large class of…
Continuous games are multiplayer games in which strategy sets are compact and utility functions are continuous. These games typically have a highly complicated structure of Nash equilibria, and numerical methods for the equilibrium…
We revisit classic algorithmic search and optimization problems from the perspective of competition. Rather than a single optimizer minimizing expected cost, we consider a zero-sum game in which an optimization problem is presented to two…
Motivated by recent developments in mean-field games in ecology, in this paper we introduce a connection between the best response dynamics in evolutionary game theory, the minimization of the highest income of a game, and minimizing…
This paper studies first-order algorithms for solving fully composite optimization problems over convex and compact sets. We leverage the structure of the objective by handling its differentiable and non-differentiable components…
We study multi-agent general-sum Markov games with nonlinear function approximation. We focus on low-rank Markov games whose transition matrix admits a hidden low-rank structure on top of an unknown non-linear representation. The goal is to…
It has been shown that a global minimizer of a smooth determinant of a matrix function corresponds to the largest cycle of a graph. When it exists, this is a Hamiltonian cycle. Finding global minimizers even of a smooth function is a…
A matrix algorithm is said to be superfast (that is, runs at sublinear cost) if it involves much fewer scalars and flops than the input matrix has entries. Such algorithms have been extensively studied and widely applied in modern…
We propose a globally-accelerated, first-order method for the optimization of smooth and (strongly or not) geodesically-convex functions in a wide class of Hadamard manifolds. We achieve the same convergence rates as Nesterov's accelerated…
Optimization tasks are crucial in statistical machine learning. Recently, there has been great interest in leveraging tools from dynamical systems to derive accelerated and robust optimization methods via suitable discretizations of…
Motivated by robust matrix recovery problems such as Robust Principal Component Analysis, we consider a general optimization problem of minimizing a smooth and strongly convex loss function applied to the sum of two blocks of variables,…
We introduce, to our knowledge, the first direct second-order method for computing Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum games. To do so, we construct a Douglas-Rachford-style splitting formulation, which we then solve with a semi-smooth…