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Related papers: Convex-Concave Zero-sum Markov Stackelberg Games

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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

Zero-sum stochastic games have found important applications in a variety of fields, from machine learning to economics. Work on this model has primarily focused on the computation of Nash equilibrium due to its effectiveness in solving…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Denizalp Goktas , Jiayi Zhao , Amy Greenwald

Behavioral diversity, expert imitation, fairness, safety goals and others give rise to preferences in sequential decision making domains that do not decompose additively across time. We introduce the class of convex Markov games that allow…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Ian Gemp , Andreas Haupt , Luke Marris , Siqi Liu , Georgios Piliouras

Min-max optimization problems (i.e., min-max games) have been attracting a great deal of attention because of their applicability to a wide range of machine learning problems. Although significant progress has been made recently, the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Denizalp Goktas , Amy Greenwald

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

We study the global convergence of policy optimization for finding the Nash equilibria (NE) in zero-sum linear quadratic (LQ) games. To this end, we first investigate the landscape of LQ games, viewing it as a nonconvex-nonconcave…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Kaiqing Zhang , Zhuoran Yang , Tamer Başar

Many recent AI architectures are inspired by zero-sum games, however, the behavior of their dynamics is still not well understood. Inspired by this, we study standard gradient descent ascent (GDA) dynamics in a specific class of non-convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-14 Lampros Flokas , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis , Georgios Piliouras

Zero-sum and non-zero-sum (aka general-sum) games are relevant in a wide range of applications. While general non-zero-sum games are computationally hard, researchers focus on the special class of monotone games for gradient-based…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ruichen Luo , Sebastian U. Stich , Krishnendu Chatterjee

Stackelberg games have been widely used to model interactive decision-making problems in a variety of domains such as energy systems, transportation, cybersecurity, and human-robot interaction. However, existing algorithms for solving…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-14 Yansong Li , Shuo Han

We develop provably efficient reinforcement learning algorithms for two-player zero-sum finite-horizon Markov games with simultaneous moves. To incorporate function approximation, we consider a family of Markov games where the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Qiaomin Xie , Yudong Chen , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Constrained Markov games offer a formal mathematical framework for modeling multi-agent reinforcement learning problems where the behavior of the agents is subject to constraints. In this work, we focus on the recently introduced class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Philip Jordan , Anas Barakat , Niao He

Zero-sum stochastic games are easy to solve as they can be cast as simple Markov decision processes. This is however not the case with general-sum stochastic games. A fairly general optimization problem formulation is available for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-02 H. L. Prasad , Shalabh Bhatnagar

This paper investigates the convergence of learning dynamics in Stackelberg games. In the class of games we consider, there is a hierarchical game being played between a leader and a follower with continuous action spaces. We establish a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-07 Tanner Fiez , Benjamin Chasnov , Lillian J. Ratliff

Min-max saddle point games appear in a wide range of applications in machine leaning and signal processing. Despite their wide applicability, theoretical studies are mostly limited to the special convex-concave structure. While some recent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-19 Babak Barazandeh , Meisam Razaviyayn

Many emerging applications - such as adversarial training, AI alignment, and robust optimization - can be framed as zero-sum games between neural nets, with von Neumann-Nash equilibria (NE) capturing the desirable system behavior. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Deep Patel , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis

In this paper, we consider a large class of constrained non-cooperative stochastic Markov games with countable state spaces and discounted cost criteria. In one-player case, i.e., constrained discounted Markov decision models, it is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-16 Anna Jaśkiewicz , Andrzej S. Nowak

We propose projection-free sequential algorithms for linear-quadratic dynamics games. These policy gradient based algorithms are akin to Stackelberg leadership model and can be extended to model-free settings. We show that if the leader…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-11-13 Jingjing Bu , Lillian J. Ratliff , Mehran Mesbahi

Zero-sum games arise in a wide variety of problems, including robust optimization and adversarial learning. However, algorithms deployed for finding a local Nash equilibrium in these games often converge to non-Nash stationary points. This…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kushagra Gupta , Xinjie Liu , Ross Allen , Ufuk Topcu , David Fridovich-Keil

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

Stochastic games are an important class of problems that generalize Markov decision processes to game theoretic scenarios. We consider finite state two-player zero-sum stochastic games over an infinite time horizon with discounted rewards.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2008-06-17 Parikshit Shah , Pablo A. Parrilo
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