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Regret minimization is a general approach to online optimization which plays a crucial role in many algorithms for approximating Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum games. The literature mainly focuses on solving individual games in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-29 David Sychrovský , Martin Schmid , Michal Šustr , Michael Bowling

This paper studies offline policy learning, which aims at utilizing observations collected a priori (from either fixed or adaptively evolving behavior policies) to learn an optimal individualized decision rule that achieves the best overall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ying Jin , Zhimei Ren , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

This paper studies policy optimization algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning. We begin by proposing an algorithm framework for two-player zero-sum Markov Games in the full-information setting, where each iteration consists of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Runyu Zhang , Qinghua Liu , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Na Li , Yu Bai

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 study reinforcement learning for two-player zero-sum Markov games with simultaneous moves in the finite-horizon setting, where the transition kernel of the underlying Markov games can be parameterized by a linear function over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Zixiang Chen , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

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

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

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn an optimal policy based on a dataset collected a priori. Due to the lack of further interactions with the environment, offline RL suffers from the insufficient coverage of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Ying Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

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

We consider the problem of minimizing a smooth convex function by reducing the optimization to computing the Nash equilibrium of a particular zero-sum convex-concave game. Zero-sum games can be solved using online learning dynamics, where a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-16 Jun-Kun Wang , Jacob Abernethy

We explore the use of policy approximations to reduce the computational cost of learning Nash equilibria in zero-sum stochastic games. We propose a new Q-learning type algorithm that uses a sequence of entropy-regularized soft policies to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Yue Guan , Qifan Zhang , Panagiotis Tsiotras

Recent extensions to dynamic games of the well-known fictitious play learning procedure in static games were proved to globally converge to stationary Nash equilibria in two important classes of dynamic games (zero-sum and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Lucas Baudin , Rida Laraki

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

We study data corruption robustness in offline two-player zero-sum Markov games. Given a dataset of realized trajectories of two players, an adversary is allowed to modify an $\epsilon$-fraction of it. The learner's goal is to identify an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Andi Nika , Debmalya Mandal , Adish Singla , Goran Radanović

We derive sublinear-time quantum algorithms for computing the Nash equilibrium of two-player zero-sum games, based on efficient Gibbs sampling methods. We are able to achieve speed-ups for both dense and sparse payoff matrices at the cost…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-04-08 Joran van Apeldoorn , András Gilyén

We introduce a novel class of Nash equilibrium seeking dynamics for non-cooperative games with a finite number of players, where the convergence to the Nash equilibrium is bounded by a KL function with a settling time that can be upper…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-25 Jorge I. Poveda , Miroslav Krstic , Tamer Basar

We introduce symmetric cone games (SCGs), a broad class of multi-player games where each player's strategy lies in a generalized simplex (the trace-one slice of a symmetric cone). This framework unifies a wide spectrum of settings,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Anas Barakat , Wayne Lin , John Lazarsfeld , Antonios Varvitsiotis

We consider online learning in multi-player smooth monotone games. Existing algorithms have limitations such as (1) being only applicable to strongly monotone games; (2) lacking the no-regret guarantee; (3) having only asymptotic or slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Yang Cai , Weiqiang Zheng

This paper resolves the open question of designing near-optimal algorithms for learning imperfect-information extensive-form games from bandit feedback. We present the first line of algorithms that require only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Yu Bai , Chi Jin , Song Mei , Tiancheng Yu

Consider a two-player zero-sum stochastic game where the transition function can be embedded in a given feature space. We propose a two-player Q-learning algorithm for approximating the Nash equilibrium strategy via sampling. The algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Zeyu Jia , Lin F. Yang , Mengdi Wang