English
Related papers

Related papers: Teaching an Old Dynamics New Tricks: Regularizatio…

200 papers

No-regret learning has emerged as a powerful tool for solving extensive-form games. This was facilitated by the counterfactual-regret minimization (CFR) framework, which relies on the instantiation of regret minimizers for simplexes at each…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Gabriele Farina , Christian Kroer , Tuomas Sandholm

Mean-field games (MFG) have become significant tools for solving large-scale multi-agent reinforcement learning problems under symmetry. However, the assumption of exact symmetry limits the applicability of MFGs, as real-world scenarios…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Batuhan Yardim , Niao He

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

Finding Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum continuous games is a central problem in machine learning, e.g. for training both GANs and robust models. The existence of pure Nash equilibria requires strong conditions which are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Carles Domingo-Enrich , Samy Jelassi , Arthur Mensch , Grant Rotskoff , Joan Bruna

A growing line of work reframes preference-based fine-tuning of large language models game-theoretically: Nash Learning from Human Feedback (NLHF) recasts the problem as a zero-sum game over policies. However, optimization is over expected…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Max Horwitz , Jake Gonzales , Eric Mazumdar , Lillian J. Ratliff

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has proven effective for enhancing model capabilities, yet standard preference modeling using the Bradley-Terry model assumes transitivity, overlooking the inherent complexity of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Shulun Chen , Runlong Zhou , Zihan Zhang , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

Last-iterate convergence of learning dynamics in games has attracted significant recent attention. In two-player zero-sum games with bandit feedback, where only the loss of the selected action pair is observed, Fiegel et al. (2025) show a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Soumita Hait , Ping Li , Haipeng Luo , Mengxiao Zhang

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) represent a zero-sum game between two machine players, a generator and a discriminator, designed to learn the distribution of data. While GANs have achieved state-of-the-art performance in several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 Farzan Farnia , Asuman Ozdaglar

This paper explores advanced topics in complex multi-agent systems building upon our previous work. We examine four fundamental challenges in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL): non-stationarity, partial observability, scalability…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Neil De La Fuente , Miquel Noguer i Alonso , Guim Casadellà

Much of recent success in multiagent reinforcement learning has been in two-player zero-sum games. In these games, algorithms such as fictitious self-play and minimax tree search can converge to an approximate Nash equilibrium. While…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-12-11 Alexander Shmakov , John Lanier , Stephen McAleer , Rohan Achar , Cristina Lopes , Pierre Baldi

Reinforcement learning from self-play has recently reported many successes. Self-play, where the agents compete with themselves, is often used to generate training data for iterative policy improvement. In previous work, heuristic rules are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Yuanyi Zhong , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

We introduce the notion of regularized Bayesian best response (RBBR) learning dynamic in heterogeneous population games. We obtain such a dynamic via perturbation by an arbitrary lower semicontinuous, strongly convex regularizer in Bayesian…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-13 Sayan Mukherjee , Souvik Roy

This paper considers the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in zero-sum stochastic games when expert demonstrations are known to be not optimal. Compared to previous works that decouple agents in the game by assuming optimality in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-07 Xingyu Wang , Diego Klabjan

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

In this paper, we examine the robustness of Nash equilibria in continuous games, under both strategic and dynamic uncertainty. Starting with the former, we introduce the notion of a robust equilibrium as those equilibria that remain…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Kyriakos Lotidis , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Nicholas Bambos , Jose Blanchet

In this paper, we examine the convergence landscape of multi-agent learning under uncertainty. Specifically, we analyze two stochastic models of regularized learning in continuous games -- one in continuous and one in discrete time with the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Kyriakos Lotidis , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Nicholas Bambos , Jose Blanchet

To establish last-iterate convergence for Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) algorithms in learning a Nash equilibrium (NE) of extensive-form games (EFGs), recent studies reformulate learning an NE of the original EFG as learning the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Linjian Meng , Youzhi Zhang , Zhenxing Ge , Shangdong Yang , Tianyu Ding , Wenbin Li , Tianpei Yang , Bo An , Yang Gao

In the nonzero-sum setting, we establish a connection between Nash equilibria in games of optimal stopping (Dynkin games) and generalised Nash equilibrium problems (GNEP). In the Dynkin game this reveals novel equilibria of threshold type…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-08-09 Randall Martyr , John Moriarty

Game theory has emerged as a powerful framework for modeling a large range of multi-agent scenarios. Many algorithmic solutions require discrete, finite games with payoffs that have a closed-form specification. In contrast, many real-world…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-06-13 Abdullah Al-Dujaili , Erik Hemberg , Una-May O'Reilly

A growing number of machine learning architectures, such as Generative Adversarial Networks, rely on the design of games which implement a desired functionality via a Nash equilibrium. In practice these games have an implicit complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Gabriel P. Andrade , Rafael Frongillo , Georgios Piliouras