Taming Equilibrium Bias in Risk-Sensitive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Yingjie Fei; Ruitu Xu

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arXiv · 2405.02724

Taming Equilibrium Bias in Risk-Sensitive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Yingjie Fei·Ruitu Xu

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Abstract

We study risk-sensitive multi-agent reinforcement learning under general-sum Markov games, where agents optimize the entropic risk measure of rewards with possibly diverse risk preferences. We show that using the regret naively adapted from existing literature as a performance metric could induce policies with equilibrium bias that favor the most risk-sensitive agents and overlook the other agents. To address such deficiency of the naive regret, we propose a novel notion of regret, which we call risk-balanced regret, and show through a lower bound that it overcomes the issue of equilibrium bias. Furthermore, we develop a self-play algorithm for learning Nash, correlated, and coarse correlated equilibria in risk-sensitive Markov games. We prove that the proposed algorithm attains near-optimal regret guarantees with respect to the risk-balanced regret.

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Yingjie Fei, Ruitu Xu. 2024-05-04. Taming Equilibrium Bias in Risk-Sensitive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02724

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