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We investigate a repeated two-player zero-sum game setting where the column player is also a designer of the system, and has full control on the design of the payoff matrix. In addition, the row player uses a no-regret algorithm to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Le Cong Dinh , Nick Bishop , Long Tran-Thanh

Online learning algorithms are designed to learn even when their input is generated by an adversary. The widely-accepted formal definition of an online algorithm's ability to learn is the game-theoretic notion of regret. We argue that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Raman Arora , Ofer Dekel , Ambuj Tewari

Recent results in the ML community have revealed that learning algorithms used to compute the optimal strategy for the leader to commit to in a Stackelberg game, are susceptible to manipulation by the follower. Such a learning algorithm…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-09-12 Georgios Birmpas , Jiarui Gan , Alexandros Hollender , Francisco J. Marmolejo-Cossío , Ninad Rajgopal , Alexandros A. Voudouris

Learning from repeated play in a fixed two-player zero-sum game is a classic problem in game theory and online learning. We consider a variant of this problem where the game payoff matrix changes over time, possibly in an adversarial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Mengxiao Zhang , Peng Zhao , Haipeng Luo , Zhi-Hua Zhou

We show that learning algorithms satisfying a $\textit{low approximate regret}$ property experience fast convergence to approximate optimality in a large class of repeated games. Our property, which simply requires that each learner has…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-12-19 Dylan J. Foster , Zhiyuan Li , Thodoris Lykouris , Karthik Sridharan , Eva Tardos

Online algorithm is an important branch in algorithm design. Designing online algorithms with a bounded competitive ratio (in terms of worst-case performance) can be hard and usually relies on problem-specific assumptions. Inspired by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-22 Bingqian Du , Zhiyi Huang , Chuan Wu

We consider online no-regret learning in unknown games with bandit feedback, where each player can only observe its reward at each time -- determined by all players' current joint action -- rather than its gradient. We focus on the class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Wenjia Ba , Tianyi Lin , Jiawei Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Junyan Liu , Lillian J. Ratliff

In classic principal-agent problems such as Stackelberg games, contract design, and Bayesian persuasion, the agent best responds to the principal's committed strategy. We study repeated generalized principal-agent problems under the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Tao Lin , Yiling Chen

Learning to play zero-sum games is a fundamental problem in game theory and machine learning. While significant progress has been made in minimizing external regret in the self-play settings or with full-information feedback, real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Shinji Ito , Haipeng Luo , Arnab Maiti , Taira Tsuchiya , Yue Wu

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic game-theoretic model to study the properties of the worst-case regret of the greedy strategy under complete (Knightian) uncertainty. In a game between a decision-maker (DM) and an adversarial agent…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Kristijan Atanasov , Mehmet Ismail , Frederik Mallmann-Trenn

We study the game redesign problem in which an external designer has the ability to change the payoff function in each round, but incurs a design cost for deviating from the original game. The players apply no-regret learning algorithms to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-10-25 Yuzhe Ma , Young Wu , Xiaojin Zhu

We consider a scenario in which two reinforcement learning agents repeatedly play a matrix game against each other and update their parameters after each round. The agents' decision-making is transparent to each other, which allows each…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-08-23 Adrian Hutter

Our paper studies the setting of players using no-regret algorithms in various two-player games. We address whether having stronger regret guarantees or playing against an opponent with weaker regret guarantees yields higher utilities for…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-29 R. Xu , E. Yachbes , J. Zhang

We study learning in a dynamically evolving environment modeled as a Markov game between a learner and a strategic opponent that can adapt to the learner's strategies. While most existing works in Markov games focus on external regret as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Raman Arora

Game theory serves as a powerful tool for distributed optimization in multi-agent systems in different applications. In this paper we consider multi-agent systems that can be modeled by means of potential games whose potential function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-04-13 Tatiana Tatarenko

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-17 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Peter L. Bartlett , Victor Gabillon , Alan Malek , Michal Valko

An abundance of recent impossibility results establish that regret minimization in Markov games with adversarial opponents is both statistically and computationally intractable. Nevertheless, none of these results preclude the possibility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Liad Erez , Tal Lancewicki , Uri Sherman , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

We address the problem of learning in an online setting where the learner repeatedly observes features, selects among a set of actions, and receives reward for the action taken. We provide the first efficient algorithm with an optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-17 Miroslav Dudik , Daniel Hsu , Satyen Kale , Nikos Karampatziakis , John Langford , Lev Reyzin , Tong Zhang

We study online learning settings in which experts act strategically to maximize their influence on the learning algorithm's predictions by potentially misreporting their beliefs about a sequence of binary events. Our goal is twofold.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Rupert Freeman , David M. Pennock , Chara Podimata , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan