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We contribute the first provable guarantees of global convergence to Nash equilibria (NE) in two-player zero-sum convex Markov games (cMGs) by using independent policy gradient methods. Convex Markov games, recently defined by Gemp et al.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Fivos Kalogiannis , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis , Ian Gemp , Georgios Piliouras

This paper considers the problem of designing optimal algorithms for reinforcement learning in two-player zero-sum games. We focus on self-play algorithms which learn the optimal policy by playing against itself without any direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Yu Bai , Chi Jin , Tiancheng Yu

Multi-agent reinforcement learning is a challenging and active field of research due to the inherent nonstationary property and coupling between agents. A popular approach to modeling the multi-agent interactions underlying the multi-agent…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jushan Chen , Santiago Paternain

We present a simple primal-dual algorithm for computing approximate Nash-equilibria in two-person zero-sum sequential games with incomplete information and perfect recall (like Texas Hold'em Poker). Our algorithm is numerically stable,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-12-24 Elvis Dohmatob

We propose a new framework of Markov $\alpha$-potential games to study Markov games. We show that any Markov game with finite-state and finite-action is a Markov $\alpha$-potential game, and establish the existence of an associated…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Xin Guo , Xinyu Li , Chinmay Maheshwari , Shankar Sastry , Manxi Wu

Over the years, researchers have studied the complexity of several decision versions of Nash equilibrium in (symmetric) two-player games (bimatrix games). To the best of our knowledge, the last remaining open problem of this sort is the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-12-03 Ruta Mehta , Vijay V. Vazirani , Sadra Yazdanbod

Policy-based methods with function approximation are widely used for solving two-player zero-sum games with large state and/or action spaces. However, it remains elusive how to obtain optimization and statistical guarantees for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Yulai Zhao , Yuandong Tian , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

Motivated by the fact that in many game-theoretic settings, the game analyzed is only an approximation to the game being played, in this work we analyze equilibrium computation for the broad and natural class of bimatrix games that are…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-03-14 Maria-Florina Balcan , Mark Braverman

Policy gradient methods enjoy strong practical performance in numerous tasks in reinforcement learning. Their theoretical understanding in multiagent settings, however, remains limited, especially beyond two-player competitive and potential…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Ioannis Anagnostides , Ioannis Panageas , Gabriele Farina , Tuomas Sandholm

This work proposes a novel distributed approach for computing a Nash equilibrium in convex games with restricted strongly monotone pseudo-gradients. By leveraging the idea of the centralized operator extrapolation method presented in [4] to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-25 Tatiana Tatarenko , Angelia Nedich

We study the existence and computation of Nash equilibria in concave games where the players' admissible strategies are subject to shared coupling constraints. Under playerwise concavity of constraints, we prove existence of Nash…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Philip Jordan , Maryam Kamgarpour

We examine global non-asymptotic convergence properties of policy gradient methods for multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) problems in Markov potential games (MPG). To learn a Nash equilibrium of an MPG in which the size of state space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-08 Dongsheng Ding , Chen-Yu Wei , Kaiqing Zhang , Mihailo R. Jovanović

We provide a complete characterization for uniqueness of equilibria in unconstrained polymatrix games. We show that while uniqueness is natural for coordination and general polymatrix games, zero-sum games require that the dimension of the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-23 James P. Bailey

We study turn-based quantitative multiplayer non zero-sum games played on finite graphs with reachability objectives. In such games, each player aims at reaching his own goal set of states as soon as possible. A previous work on this model…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-03-14 Thomas Brihaye , Véronique Bruyère , Julie De Pril , Hugo Gimbert

In this paper, we study nonzero-sum separable games, which are continuous games whose payoffs take a sum-of-products form. Included in this subclass are all finite games and polynomial games. We investigate the structure of equilibria in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2010-04-26 Noah D. Stein , Asuman Ozdaglar , Pablo A. Parrilo

We study the computational complexity of finding Stackelberg Equilibria in general-sum games, where the set of pure strategies of the leader and the followers are exponentially large in a natrual representation of the problem. In…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Avrim Blum , Nika Hagtalab , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi , Saeed Seddighin

Many models from a variety of areas involve the computation of an equilibrium or fixed point of some kind. Examples include Nash equilibria in games; market equilibria; computing optimal strategies and the values of competitive games…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2008-02-21 Mihalis Yannakakis

We show that computing approximate stationary Markov coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) in general-sum stochastic games is computationally intractable, even when there are two players, the game is turn-based, the discount factor is an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Constantinos Daskalakis , Noah Golowich , Kaiqing Zhang

Synthesis of finite-state controllers from high-level specifications in multi-agent systems can be reduced to solving multi-player concurrent games over finite graphs. The complexity of solving such games with qualitative objectives for…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-09-28 Shaull Almagor , Rajeev Alur , Suguman Bansal

A fundamental shortcoming of the concept of Nash equilibrium is its computational intractability: approximating Nash equilibria in normal-form games is PPAD-hard. In this paper, inspired by the ideas of smoothed analysis, we introduce a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Constantinos Daskalakis , Noah Golowich , Nika Haghtalab , Abhishek Shetty