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Markov games model interactions among multiple players in a stochastic, dynamic environment. Each player in a Markov game maximizes its expected total discounted reward, which depends upon the policies of the other players. We formulate a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-11 Shenghui Chen , Yue Yu , David Fridovich-Keil , Ufuk Topcu

The approximation of mixed Nash equilibria (MNE) for zero-sum games with mean-field interacting players has recently raised much interest in machine learning. In this paper we propose a mean-field gradient descent dynamics for finding the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-13 Yulong Lu , Pierre Monmarché

Computing approximate Nash equilibria in multi-player general-sum Markov games is a computationally intractable task. However, multi-player Markov games with certain cooperative or competitive structures might circumvent this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-08-17 Zailin Ma , Jiansheng Yang , Zhihua Zhang

While multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has produced numerous algorithms that converge to Nash or related equilibria, such equilibria are often non-unique and can exhibit widely varying efficiency. This raises a fundamental…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Runyu Zhang , Gioele Zardini , Asuman Ozdaglar , Jeff Shamma , Na Li

Multi-agent interactions are increasingly important in the context of reinforcement learning, and the theoretical foundations of policy gradient methods have attracted surging research interest. We investigate the global convergence of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-21 Sarath Pattathil , Kaiqing Zhang , Asuman Ozdaglar

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

Learning in games provides a powerful framework to design control policies for self-interested agents that may be coupled through their dynamics, costs, or constraints. We consider the case where the dynamics of the coupled system can be…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-18 Mostafa M. Shibl , Vijay Gupta

We study the problem of learning a Nash equilibrium (NE) in Markov games which is a cornerstone in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). In particular, we focus on infinite-horizon adversarial team Markov games (ATMGs) in which agents…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Fivos Kalogiannis , Jingming Yan , Ioannis Panageas

Markov Potential Games (MPGs) form an important sub-class of Markov games, which are a common framework to model multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. In particular, MPGs include as a special case the identical-interest setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Pragnya Alatur , Anas Barakat , Niao He

We study the problem of finding the Nash equilibrium in a two-player zero-sum Markov game. Due to its formulation as a minimax optimization program, a natural approach to solve the problem is to perform gradient descent/ascent with respect…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-13 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Markov games (MGs) provide a mathematical foundation for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), enabling self-interested agents to learn their optimal policies while interacting with others in a shared environment. However, due to the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-25 Huiwen Yan , Mushuang Liu

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 reinforcement learning for two-player zero-sum Markov games with simultaneous moves in the finite-horizon setting, where the transition kernel of the underlying Markov games can be parameterized by a linear function over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Zixiang Chen , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

We consider a general-sum N-player linear-quadratic game with stochastic dynamics over a finite horizon and prove the global convergence of the natural policy gradient method to the Nash equilibrium. In order to prove the convergence of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-16 Ben Hambly , Renyuan Xu , Huining Yang

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 (MARL) lies at the heart of a plethora of applications involving the interaction of a group of agents in a shared unknown environment. A prominent framework for studying MARL is Markov games, with the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Tong Yang , Bo Dai , Lin Xiao , Yuejie Chi

Learning problems commonly exhibit an interesting feedback mechanism wherein the population data reacts to competing decision makers' actions. This paper formulates a new game theoretic framework for this phenomenon, called "multi-player…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Adhyyan Narang , Evan Faulkner , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy , Maryam Fazel , Lillian J. Ratliff

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has made substantial empirical progresses in solving games with a large number of players. However, theoretically, the best known sample complexity for finding a Nash equilibrium in general-sum games…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Ziang Song , Song Mei , Yu Bai

We investigate Nash equilibrium learning in a competitive Markov Game (MG) environment, where multiple agents compete, and multiple Nash equilibria can exist. In particular, for an oligopolistic dynamic pricing environment, exact Nash…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Larkin Liu

This paper makes progress towards learning Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum Markov games from offline data. Specifically, consider a $\gamma$-discounted infinite-horizon Markov game with $S$ states, where the max-player has $A$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Yuling Yan , Gen Li , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan