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We study offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov games, where the goal is to learn an approximate equilibrium -- such as Nash equilibrium and (Coarse) Correlated Equilibrium -- from an offline dataset pre-collected from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yuheng Zhang , Yu Bai , Nan Jiang

We introduce a model-free algorithm for learning in Markov decision processes with parameterized actions-discrete actions with continuous parameters. At each step the agent must select both which action to use and which parameters to use…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-30 Warwick Masson , Pravesh Ranchod , George Konidaris

The standard risk minimization paradigm of machine learning is brittle when operating in environments whose test distributions are different from the training distribution due to spurious correlations. Training on data from many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-20 Kartik Ahuja , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Kush R. Varshney , Amit Dhurandhar

Similar to the role of Markov decision processes in reinforcement learning, Stochastic Games (SGs) lay the foundation for the study of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and sequential agent interactions. In this paper, we derive…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Xiaotie Deng , Ningyuan Li , David Mguni , Jun Wang , Yaodong Yang

The works of (Daskalakis et al., 2009, 2022; Jin et al., 2022; Deng et al., 2023) indicate that computing Nash equilibria in multi-player Markov games is a computationally hard task. This fact raises the question of whether or not…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Fivos Kalogiannis , Ioannis Panageas

Reinforcement learning has traditionally been studied with exponential discounting or the average reward setup, mainly due to their mathematical tractability. However, such frameworks fall short of accurately capturing human behavior, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 S. R. Eshwar , Mayank Motwani , Nibedita Roy , Gugan Thoppe

To overcome the sim-to-real gap in reinforcement learning (RL), learned policies must maintain robustness against environmental uncertainties. While robust RL has been widely studied in single-agent regimes, in multi-agent environments, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Laixi Shi , Eric Mazumdar , Yuejie Chi , Adam Wierman

No-regret learning dynamics play a central role in game theory, enabling decentralized convergence to equilibrium for concepts such as Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE) or Correlated Equilibrium (CE). In this work, we improve the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Asrin Efe Yorulmaz , Tamer Başar

This paper studies the finite-time horizon Markov games where the agents' dynamics are decoupled but the rewards can possibly be coupled across agents. The policy class is restricted to local policies where agents make decisions using their…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Runyu Zhang , Yuyang Zhang , Rohit Konda , Bryce Ferguson , Jason Marden , Na Li

Markov Games (MG) is an important model for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). It was long believed that the "curse of multi-agents" (i.e., the algorithmic performance drops exponentially with the number of agents) is unavoidable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Yan Dai , Qiwen Cui , Simon S. Du

We study the game modification problem, where a benevolent game designer or a malevolent adversary modifies the reward function of a zero-sum Markov game so that a target deterministic or stochastic policy profile becomes the unique Markov…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Young Wu , Jeremy McMahan , Yiding Chen , Yudong Chen , Xiaojin Zhu , Qiaomin Xie

This work studies an independent natural policy gradient (NPG) algorithm for the multi-agent reinforcement learning problem in Markov potential games. It is shown that, under mild technical assumptions and the introduction of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Youbang Sun , Tao Liu , Ruida Zhou , P. R. Kumar , Shahin Shahrampour

This paper investigates posterior sampling algorithms for competitive reinforcement learning (RL) in the context of general function approximations. Focusing on zero-sum Markov games (MGs) under two critical settings, namely self-play and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Shuang Qiu , Ziyu Dai , Han Zhong , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Tong Zhang

Model-free reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a range of challenging problems, and has recently been extended to handle large neural network policies and value functions. However, the sample complexity of model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-03 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Ilya Sutskever , Sergey Levine

Q-learning, which seeks to learn the optimal Q-function of a Markov decision process (MDP) in a model-free fashion, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning. When it comes to the synchronous setting (such that independent samples for all…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-18 Gen Li , Changxiao Cai , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi

Recently there is a surge of interest in understanding the horizon-dependence of the sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL). Notably, for an RL environment with horizon length $H$, previous work have shown that there is a probably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Yuanzhi Li , Ruosong Wang , Lin F. Yang

Non-cooperative dynamic game theory provides a principled approach to modeling sequential decision-making among multiple noncommunicative agents. A key focus has been on finding Nash equilibria in two-agent zero-sum dynamic games under…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Kushagra Gupta , Ross Allen , David Fridovich-Keil , Ufuk Topcu

We initiate the study of how to perturb the reward in a zero-sum Markov game with two players to induce a desirable Nash equilibrium, namely arbitrating. Such a problem admits a bi-level optimization formulation. The lower level requires…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Jing Wang , Meichen Song , Feng Gao , Boyi Liu , Zhaoran Wang , Yi Wu

Nash Q-learning may be considered one of the first and most known algorithms in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for learning policies that constitute a Nash equilibrium of an underlying general-sum Markov game. Its original proof…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Sanmi Koyejo

We propose a novel independent and payoff-based learning framework for stochastic games that is model-free, game-agnostic, and gradient-free. The learning dynamics follow a best-response-type actor-critic architecture, where agents update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ahmed Said Donmez , Yuksel Arslantas , Muhammed O. Sayin