Regret Minimization with Adaptive Opponents in Repeated Games
In this paper, we study regret minimization in repeated games with \emph{adaptive} opponents who can respond based on histories of play. The standard metric of \emph{external regret} in online learning is known to fail to capture such adaptivity. To account for players' counterfactual reasoning, we introduce {\tt Repeated Policy Regret (RP-Regret)}, a game-theoretic metric that measures the difference between the \emph{realized} and the \emph{best-in-hindsight} accumulated utility when all players can \emph{respond} to the history of play. Compared to existing regret notions in this setting, ours is native to repeated game playing, enabling stronger comparators and opponents with fewer constraints, while maintaining the possibility of finding better equilibria when all players minimize it. We first identify necessary conditions for obtaining {\tt RP-Regret} sublinear in time, on the variation of the player's comparator strategies in the regret definition and on the memories of both the comparator and opponents' strategies. We then study additional conditions and provable algorithms to minimize {\tt RP-Regret}, which is by definition \emph{non-convex} in the strategy space. To address this challenge, we propose three algorithms: (i) one based on an optimization oracle, as assumed in some prior work in online non-convex learning; (ii) one that minimizes a convex and \emph{linearized} surrogate of {\tt RP-Regret} at each iteration; (iii) one that directly minimizes {\tt RP-Regret} when opponents change strategies slowly. Furthermore, when all players can run algorithms to minimize the {\tt RP-Regret} (or its linearized variant), certain subgame perfect equilibria of the repeated game can be learned. We also provide experiments showing that minimizing our regret notions can lead to more cooperative solutions with higher utility in games such as Stag-Hunt.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Regret Minimization and Convergence to Equilibria in General-sum Markov Games
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 preclu…
Efficient Regret Minimization in Non-Convex Games
We consider regret minimization in repeated games with non-convex loss functions. Minimizing the standard notion of regret is computationally intractable. Thus, we define a natural notion of regret which permits efficien…
Balancing Adaptability and Non-exploitability in Repeated Games
We study the problem of guaranteeing low regret in repeated games against an opponent with unknown membership in one of several classes. We add the constraint that our algorithm is non-exploitable, in that the opponent l…
Is Learning in Games Good for the Learners?
We consider a number of questions related to tradeoffs between reward and regret in repeated gameplay between two agents. To facilitate this, we introduce a notion of $\textit{generalized equilibrium}$ which allows for a…
Online Learning in Unknown Markov Games
We study online learning in unknown Markov games, a problem that arises in episodic multi-agent reinforcement learning where the actions of the opponents are unobservable. We show that in this challenging setting, achiev…
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning