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We study the problem of learning minimax policies in zero-sum matrix games. Fiegel et al. (2025) recently showed that achieving last-iterate convergence in this setting is harder when the players are uncoupled, by proving a lower bound on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Come Fiegel , Pierre Menard , Tadashi Kozuno , Michal Valko , Vianney Perchet

We study decentralized policy learning in Markov games where we control a single agent to play with nonstationary and possibly adversarial opponents. Our goal is to develop a no-regret online learning algorithm that (i) takes actions based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Wenhao Zhan , Jason D. Lee , Zhuoran Yang

Many reinforcement learning algorithms can be seen as versions of approximate policy iteration (API). While standard API often performs poorly, it has been shown that learning can be stabilized by regularizing each policy update by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Nevena Lazić , Botao Hao , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Dale Schuurmans , Csaba Szepesvári

Recently, Daskalakis, Fishelson, and Golowich (DFG) (NeurIPS`21) showed that if all agents in a multi-player general-sum normal-form game employ Optimistic Multiplicative Weights Update (OMWU), the external regret of every player is…

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

Quantile (and, more generally, KL) regret bounds, such as those achieved by NormalHedge (Chaudhuri, Freund, and Hsu 2009) and its variants, relax the goal of competing against the best individual expert to only competing against a majority…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-09 Jeffrey Negrea , Blair Bilodeau , Nicolò Campolongo , Francesco Orabona , Daniel M. Roy

In game theory, imperfect-recall decision problems model situations in which an agent forgets information it held before. They encompass games such as the ``absentminded driver'' and team games with limited communication. In this paper, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Emanuel Tewolde , Brian Hu Zhang , Ioannis Anagnostides , Tuomas Sandholm , Vincent Conitzer

We examine online safe multi-agent reinforcement learning using constrained Markov games in which agents compete by maximizing their expected total rewards under a constraint on expected total utilities. Our focus is confined to an episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Dongsheng Ding , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Mihailo R. Jovanović

Regret-based algorithms are highly efficient at finding approximate Nash equilibria in sequential games such as poker games. However, most regret-based algorithms, including counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) and its variants, rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Chung-Wei Lee , Christian Kroer , Haipeng Luo

While ERM suffices to attain near-optimal generalization error in the stochastic learning setting, this is not known to be the case in the online learning setting, where algorithms for general concept classes rely on computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Angelos Assos , Idan Attias , Yuval Dagan , Constantinos Daskalakis , Maxwell Fishelson

In this paper, we propose a provably convergent and practical framework for multi-objective reinforcement learning with max-min criterion. From a game-theoretic perspective, we reformulate max-min multi-objective reinforcement learning as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Woohyeon Byeon , Giseung Park , Jongseong Chae , Amir Leshem , Youngchul Sung

We study last-iterate convergence properties of algorithms for solving two-player zero-sum games based on Regret Matching$^+$ (RM$^+$). Despite their widespread use for solving real games, virtually nothing is known about their last-iterate…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yang Cai , Gabriele Farina , Julien Grand-Clément , Christian Kroer , Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Weiqiang Zheng

An $\alpha$-potential game is a multi-player non-cooperative interaction in which a global potential function approximates individual player rewards up to a structural bias $\alpha$. While identifying a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in generic…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claire Chen , Yuheng Zhang

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

We propose the first online quantum algorithm for solving zero-sum games with $\widetilde O(1)$ regret under the game setting. Moreover, our quantum algorithm computes an $\varepsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium of an $m \times n$ matrix…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-10-01 Minbo Gao , Zhengfeng Ji , Tongyang Li , Qisheng Wang

This paper studies the optimistic variant of Fictitious Play for learning in two-player zero-sum games. While it is known that Optimistic FTRL -- a regularized algorithm with a bounded stepsize parameter -- obtains constant regret in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 John Lazarsfeld , Georgios Piliouras , Ryann Sim , Stratis Skoulakis

Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) has found success in settings like poker which have both terminal states and perfect recall. We seek to understand how to relax these requirements. As a first step, we introduce a simple algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-17 Ian A. Kash , Michael Sullins , Katja Hofmann

Reinforcement learning (RL) so far has limited real-world applications. One key challenge is that typical RL algorithms heavily rely on a reset mechanism to sample proper initial states; these reset mechanisms, in practice, are expensive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Hoai-An Nguyen , Ching-An Cheng

While single-agent policy optimization in a fixed environment has attracted a lot of research attention recently in the reinforcement learning community, much less is known theoretically when there are multiple agents playing in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-27 Shuang Qiu , Xiaohan Wei , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Self-play via online learning is one of the premier ways to solve large-scale two-player zero-sum games, both in theory and practice. Particularly popular algorithms include optimistic multiplicative weights update (OMWU) and optimistic…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Yang Cai , Gabriele Farina , Julien Grand-Clément , Christian Kroer , Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Weiqiang Zheng