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We study the problem of learning Nash equilibria in offline two-player zero-sum Markov games. While existing approaches often rely on explicit pessimism to address distribution shift, we show that KL regularization alone suffices to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Claire Chen , Yuheng Zhang , Xinyu Liu , Zixuan Xie , Shuze Daniel Liu , Nan Jiang

Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning in general-sum settings is challenged by the distribution shift between logged datasets and target equilibrium policies. While standard methods rely on manual pessimistic penalties, we demonstrate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claire Chen , Yuheng Zhang

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

Reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization with respect to a fixed reference policy is widely used in modern reinforcement learning to preserve the desired traits of the reference policy and sometimes to promote…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Anupam Nayak , Tong Yang , Osman Yagan , Gauri Joshi , Yuejie Chi

We study episodic two-player zero-sum Markov games (MGs) in the offline setting, where the goal is to find an approximate Nash equilibrium (NE) policy pair based on a dataset collected a priori. When the dataset does not have uniform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Han Zhong , Wei Xiong , Jiyuan Tan , Liwei Wang , Tong Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

We study model-based and model-free policy optimization in a class of nonzero-sum stochastic dynamic games called linear quadratic (LQ) deep structured games. In such games, players interact with each other through a set of weighted…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Masoud Roudneshin , Jalal Arabneydi , Amir G. Aghdam

In this paper, we study distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (robust offline RL), which seeks to find an optimal policy purely from an offline dataset that can perform well in perturbed environments. In specific, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Jose Blanchet , Miao Lu , Tong Zhang , Han Zhong

This paper considers the problem of designing optimal algorithms for reinforcement learning in two-player zero-sum games. We focus on self-play algorithms which learn the optimal policy by playing against itself without any direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Yu Bai , Chi Jin , Tiancheng Yu

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

Two-player games such as board games have long been used as traditional benchmarks for reinforcement learning. This work revisits a policy optimization method with reverse Kullback-Leibler regularization and entropy regularization and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Kazuki Ota , Takayuki Osa , Motoki Omura , Tatsuya Harada

We consider offline policy optimization (OPO) in contextual bandits, where one is given a fixed dataset of logged interactions. While pessimistic regularizers are typically used to mitigate distribution shift, prior implementations thereof…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Lequn Wang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Pessimism is of great importance in offline reinforcement learning (RL). One broad category of offline RL algorithms fulfills pessimism by explicit or implicit behavior regularization. However, most of them only consider policy divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Chen Chen , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Chao Wang , Qianli Shen , Dong Li , Jianye Hao

We study offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov games, where the goal is to learn an approximate equilibrium -- such as Nash equilibrium and (Coarse) Correlated Equilibrium -- from an offline dataset pre-collected from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yuheng Zhang , Yu Bai , Nan Jiang

Offline or batch reinforcement learning seeks to learn a near-optimal policy using history data without active exploration of the environment. To counter the insufficient coverage and sample scarcity of many offline datasets, the principle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find highly rewarding policy, by leveraging a previously collected static dataset and a dynamics model. While the dynamics model learned through reuse of the static dataset, its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Kaiyang Guo , Yunfeng Shao , Yanhui Geng

We study what dataset assumption permits solving offline two-player zero-sum Markov games. In stark contrast to the offline single-agent Markov decision process, we show that the single strategy concentration assumption is insufficient for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Qiwen Cui , Simon S. Du

This paper makes progress towards learning Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum Markov games from offline data. Specifically, consider a $\gamma$-discounted infinite-horizon Markov game with $S$ states, where the max-player has $A$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Yuling Yan , Gen Li , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan

Language model alignment methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have led to impressive advances in language model capabilities, but are limited by a widely observed phenomenon known as overoptimization, where the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Audrey Huang , Wenhao Zhan , Tengyang Xie , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Dylan J. Foster

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been able to solve hard problems such as playing Atari games or solving the game of Go, with a unified approach. Yet modern deep RL approaches are still not widely used in real-world applications. One reason…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Achraf Azize , Othman Gaizi

In game-theoretic learning, several agents are simultaneously following their individual interests, so the environment is non-stationary from each player's perspective. In this context, the performance of a learning algorithm is often…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Yu-Guan Hsieh , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Panayotis Mertikopoulos
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