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Despite the significant potential for various applications, stochastic games with long-run average payoffs have received limited scholarly attention, particularly concerning the development of learning algorithms for them due to the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Junyue Zhang , Yifen Mu

We study the convergence of several natural policy gradient (NPG) methods in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes with regular policy parametrizations. For a variety of NPGs and reward functions we show that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-21 Johannes Müller , Guido Montúfar

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

Softmax policy gradient is a popular algorithm for policy optimization in single-agent reinforcement learning, particularly since projection is not needed for each gradient update. However, in multi-agent systems, the lack of central…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-01 Runyu Zhang , Jincheng Mei , Bo Dai , Dale Schuurmans , Na Li

We study infinite-horizon discounted two-player zero-sum Markov games, and develop a decentralized algorithm that provably converges to the set of Nash equilibria under self-play. Our algorithm is based on running an Optimistic Gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-08 Chen-Yu Wei , Chung-Wei Lee , Mengxiao Zhang , Haipeng Luo

In this paper, we consider an infinite horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Distinguishing itself from existing works within this context, our approach harnesses the power of the general policy gradient-based algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Qinbo Bai , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Nash equilibrium is a central concept in game theory. Several Nash solvers exist, yet none scale to normal-form games with many actions and many players, especially those with payoff tensors too big to be stored in memory. In this work, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Ian Gemp , Rahul Savani , Marc Lanctot , Yoram Bachrach , Thomas Anthony , Richard Everett , Andrea Tacchetti , Tom Eccles , János Kramár

Potential games are arguably one of the most important and widely studied classes of normal form games. They define the archetypal setting of multi-agent coordination as all agent utilities are perfectly aligned with each other via a common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Stefanos Leonardos , Will Overman , Ioannis Panageas , Georgios Piliouras

Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods are among the most widely used policy optimization algorithms in contemporary reinforcement learning. This class of methods is often applied in conjunction with entropy regularization -- an algorithmic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-13 Shicong Cen , Chen Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi

Finding Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games remains a central challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning. Recent multi-round regularization methods offer a promising direction, yet existing approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Eason Yu , Tzu Hao Liu , Clément L. Canonne , Yunke Wang , Chang Xu , Nguyen H. Tran , Stefano V. Albrecht

A wide variety of queueing systems can be naturally modeled as infinite-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In the reinforcement learning (RL) context, a variety of algorithms have been developed to learn and optimize these MDPs. At the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Isaac Grosof , Siva Theja Maguluri , R. Srikant

Learning in stochastic games is a notoriously difficult problem because, in addition to each other's strategic decisions, the players must also contend with the fact that the game itself evolves over time, possibly in a very complicated…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Angeliki Giannou , Kyriakos Lotidis , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis

We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes and study the convergence rates of the natural policy gradient (NPG) and the Q-NPG methods with the log-linear policy class. Using the compatible function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Rui Yuan , Simon S. Du , Robert M. Gower , Alessandro Lazaric , Lin Xiao

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 Nash equilibrium learning in partially observable Markov games (POMGs), a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework in which agents cannot fully observe the underlying state. Prior work in this setting relies on centralization…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Philip Jordan , Maryam Kamgarpour

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 generalize Markov decision processes (MDPs) to a multiagent setting by allowing the state transitions to depend jointly on all player actions, and having rewards determined by multiplayer matrix games at each state. We…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Michael Kearns , Yishay Mansour , Satinder Singh

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

We present two Policy Gradient-based algorithms with general parametrization in the context of infinite-horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). The first one employs Implicit Gradient Transport for variance reduction, ensuring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Swetha Ganesh , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

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