SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2406.08683

Simultaneous incremental support adjustment and metagame solving: An equilibrium-finding framework for continuous-action games

Abstract

We present a framework for computing approximate mixed-strategy Nash equilibria of continuous-action games. It is a modification of the traditional double oracle algorithm, extended to multiple players and continuous action spaces. Unlike prior methods, it maintains fixed-cardinality pure strategy sets for each player. Thus, unlike prior methods, only a constant amount of memory is necessary. Furthermore, it does not require exact metagame solving on each iteration, which can be computationally expensive for large metagames. Moreover, it does not require global best-response computation on each iteration, which can be computationally expensive or even intractable for high-dimensional action spaces and general games. Our method incrementally reduces the exploitability of the strategy profile in the finite metagame, pushing it toward Nash equilibrium. Simultaneously, it incrementally improves the pure strategies that best respond to this strategy profile in the full game. We evaluate our method on various continuous-action games, showing that it obtains approximate mixed-strategy Nash equilibria with low exploitability.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Carlos Martin, Tuomas Sandholm. 2024-06-12. Simultaneous incremental support adjustment and metagame solving: An equilibrium-finding framework for continuous-action games. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08683

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

MMS Allocation for Chores with Online Agent Arrivals

We study the fair allocation of $m$ indivisible chores to $n$ agents with subadditive cost functions arriving online in an arbitrary order. Upon an agent's arrival, we are informed of her cost function and must irrevocably assign her a set of chores. We focus on the Maximin Share (MMS) fairness notion and aim to compute an allocation in which all items are assigned, and no agent incurs a cost more than $\alpha$ times her MMS. Without any prior information about the instance (other than $n$ and $m$), we design an algorithm with a competitive ratio of $O(\min\{n, k\log^{1+\epsilon}k, \log m\})$ for any constant $\epsilon > 0$, where $k$ denotes the number of cost function types. Our bound matches the best known offline approximation guarantees for MMS under subadditive costs and is nearly optimal with respect to all three parameters: we show that even for binary additive cost functions, no online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio of $o(\min\{n, k\log k, \log m\})$. We then consider the setting in which the $k$ cost function types are known in advance (though the realized types of arriving agents are not). For additive cost functions, we provide an algorithm with a competitive ratio of $O(\min\{\log k, \log(kn)/\log\log(kn)\})$, and show that constant-competitive algorithms do not exist for general $k$, even for the binary additive setting. For binary additive functions when $k \le n$, we propose a $3$-competitive algorithm and establish a lower bound of $2$.

cs.GT

Truncated Noisy Best-Response Algorithms: Toward Game Theoretic Learning with Safety Guarantees

We consider a game theoretic approach to solve multi-agent coordination problems with submodular maximization objectives. It is known for such problems that the Nash equilibria for the corresponding game are always within 50% of the optimal, but that the equilibria which achieve this worst-case bound are not stable. To exploit this instability, we propose a family of algorithms which we call Truncated Noisy Best-Response (TNBR) Algorithms. These algorithms are flexibly characterized by agents asynchronously and stochastically selecting actions from a neighbourhood of their best response payoffs. We compute bounds on the recurrent classes of TNBR algorithms' associated Markov chains. Our bounds fall into two categories: first, "Performance" bounds ensure that TNBR algorithms always have a high-value recurrent state; second, "Safety" bounds ensure that TNBR algorithms never have arbitrarily-bad recurrent states. Furthermore, these two types of bounds are linked by a waterbed-like effect: every game with a poor Safety guarantee necessarily has a favorable Performance guarantee.

cs.GT

Existence of the Core in Approval-Based Committee Elections

We settle the main open question in the theory of approval-based multi-winner elections: we show that there always exists a committee in the core. The core is a stability and group fairness concept. The proof introduces a new voting rule that optimizes an entropy-like objective function over committees and payment systems. All local optima of this objective function lie in the core, which implies that a core committee can be found in polynomial time.

cs.GT