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We consider the problem of finding a Nash equilibrium (NE) in a general-sum game, where player $i$'s objective is $f_i(x)=f_i(x_1,...,x_n)$, with $x_j\in\mathbb{R}^{d_j}$ denoting the strategy variables of player $j$. Our focus is on…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yutong Chao , Jalal Etesami

Contemporary applications of machine learning in two-team e-sports and the superior expressivity of multi-agent generative adversarial networks raise important and overlooked theoretical questions regarding optimization in two-team games.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Fivos Kalogiannis , Ioannis Panageas , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis

Distributed optimization and Nash equilibrium (NE) seeking problems have drawn much attention in the control community recently. This paper studies a class of non-cooperative games, known as N-cluster game, which subsumes both cooperative…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-01 Yipeng Pang , Guoqiang Hu

In this paper, we consider concave continuous-kernel games characterized by monotonicity properties and propose discounted mirror descent-type dynamics. We introduce two classes of dynamics whereby the associated mirror map is constructed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-30 Bolin Gao , Lacra Pavel

In this paper, we study the problem of (finite sum) minimax optimization in the Differential Privacy (DP) model. Unlike most of the previous studies on the (strongly) convex-concave settings or loss functions satisfying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Ruijia Zhang , Mingxi Lei , Meng Ding , Zihang Xiang , Jinhui Xu , Di Wang

Online gradient descent (OGD) is well known to be doubly optimal under strong convexity or monotonicity assumptions: (1) in the single-agent setting, it achieves an optimal regret of $\Theta(\log T)$ for strongly convex cost functions; and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Michael I. Jordan , Tianyi Lin , Zhengyuan Zhou

We propose the first loss function for approximate Nash equilibria of normal-form games that is amenable to unbiased Monte Carlo estimation. This construction allows us to deploy standard non-convex stochastic optimization techniques for…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Ian Gemp , Luke Marris , Georgios Piliouras

We propose a stochastic GDA (gradient descent ascent) method with backtracking (SGDA-B) to solve nonconvex-concave (NCC) minimax problems of the form: $\min_{\mathbf{x}} \max_y \sum_{i=1}^N g_i(x_i)+f(\mathbf{x},y)-h(y)$, where $h$ and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-14 Necdet Serhat Aybat , Qiushui Xu , Xuan Zhang , Mert Gürbüzbalaban

Many modern machine learning algorithms such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and adversarial training can be formulated as minimax optimization. Gradient descent ascent (GDA) is the most commonly used algorithm due to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Huan He , Shifan Zhao , Yuanzhe Xi , Joyce C Ho , Yousef Saad

In this paper, we study the minimax optimization problem in the smooth and strongly convex-strongly concave setting when we have access to noisy estimates of gradients. In particular, we first analyze the stochastic Gradient Descent Ascent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-14 Alireza Fallah , Asuman Ozdaglar , Sarath Pattathil

The study of nonconvex minimax games has gained significant momentum in machine learning and decision science communities due to their fundamental connections to adversarial training scenarios. This work develops a primal-dual alternating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-25 Huiling Zhang , Zi Xu , Yu-Hong Dai

In this short note, we consider the problem of solving a min-max zero-sum game. This problem has been extensively studied in the convex-concave regime where the global solution can be computed efficiently. Recently, there have also been…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-11 Maziar Sanjabi , Meisam Razaviyayn , Jason D. Lee

Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) is one of the most prominent algorithms for solving min-max optimization and variational inequalities problems (VIP) appearing in various machine learning tasks. The success of the method led to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-09 Aleksandr Beznosikov , Eduard Gorbunov , Hugo Berard , Nicolas Loizou

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

While Online Gradient Descent and other no-regret learning procedures are known to efficiently converge to a coarse correlated equilibrium in games where each agent's utility is concave in their own strategy, this is not the case when…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Yang Cai , Constantinos Daskalakis , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Weiqiang Zheng

Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-28 Tuo Liu , El Mehdi Saad , Wojciech Kotłowski , Francesco Orabona

Methods from convex optimization such as accelerated gradient descent are widely used as building blocks for deep learning algorithms. However, the reasons for their empirical success are unclear, since neural networks are not convex and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-11 David Balduzzi

The behaviour of multi-agent learning in competitive settings is often considered under the restrictive assumption of a zero-sum game. Only under this strict requirement is the behaviour of learning well understood; beyond this, learning…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Aamal Hussain , Francesco Belardinelli , Georgios Piliouras

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Yunwen Lei , Ting Hu , Guiying Li , Ke Tang

We present a first-order method for solving constrained optimization problems. The method is derived from our previous work, a modified search direction method inspired by singular value decomposition. In this work, we simplify its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-24 Long Chen , Kai-Uwe Bletzinger , Nicolas R. Gauger , Yinyu Ye