arXiv:2608. 09389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This note aims to serve as an entry point to the literature on learning in games, a topic with significant theoretical appeal and a wide range of applications -- from machine learning and data science to economics and beyond.
By Panayotis Mertikopoulos
NashDreamer is a new model-based reinforcement learning framework designed for two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games. It introduces a centralized Multi-Agent Recurrent State-Space Model that separates environment dynamics from player strategy effects, enabling the use of any policy gradient algorithm while preserving convergence guarantees to Nash equilibria. Experiments on four benchmark games show that NashDreamer achieves significantly better sample efficiency than model-free baselines early in training, and the authors analyze its optimization landscape, noting a potential vulnerability to posterior collapse in stochastic settings.
By Tom\'a\v{s} Hole\v{c}ek, Viliam Lis\'y
arXiv:2606. 23995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has established that regularized policy gradient methods such as PPO, when used in self-play, can match or exceed specialized game-theoretic algorithms for solving two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games.
By Tristan Maidment, JB Lanier, Chase McDonald, Nathan Tsang, Eugene Vinitsky, Roy Fox, Albert Wang, Wesley N. Kerr
arXiv:2508. 04225v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Regularized Policy Optimization (BRPO) leverages asymmetric divergence regularization to mitigate distribution shift in offline reinforcement learning.
By Lingwei Zhu, Haseeb Shah, Zheng Chen, Martha White
arXiv:2509. 25618v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: There has been significant recent progress in algorithms for approximation of Nash equilibrium in large two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games and exact computation of Nash equilibrium in multiplayer strategic-form games.
By Sam Ganzfried
arXiv:2606. 11284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world multi-agent systems, from traffic coordination to resource allocation, are often modeled as general-sum games where individual incentives conflict with collective welfare.
By Wongyu Lee, Francesco Lelli, Omran Ayoub, Massimo Tornatore
arXiv:2606. 01382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference alignment is central to improving large language models, but standard reward-based formulations can be restrictive when human preferences are cyclic, non-transitive, or otherwise not representable by a scalar reward.
By Tianlong Nan, Xiaopeng Li, Christian Kroer, Tianyi Lin
arXiv:2310. 07211v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Regularization is a cornerstone of modern reinforcement learning.
By Zeyang Li, Chuxiong Hu, Yunan Wang, Guojian Zhan, Jie Li, Yao Lyu, Shengbo Eben Li
arXiv:2602. 21436v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we study last-iterate convergence of learning algorithms in bilinear saddle-point problems, a preferable notion of convergence that captures the day-to-day behavior of learning dynamics.
By Arnab Maiti, Claire Jie Zhang, Kevin Jamieson, Jamie Heather Morgenstern, Ioannis Panageas, Lillian J. Ratliff
arXiv:2606. 00367v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning problems typically define the goal as maximizing the expected value of a scalar reward function.
By Jonathan Cola\c{c}o Carr, Prakash Panangaden, Doina Precup, Benjamin Van Roy
The paper introduces Policy Gradient Penalty (PGP), a single‑loop policy‑space method that enforces convex occupancy‑measure constraints via quadratic‑penalty regularization. PGP constructs pseudo‑rewards to estimate gradients of the penalized objective and uses the classical Policy Gradient Theorem, establishing smoothness and global last‑iterate convergence guarantees for an ε‑optimal constrained entropy value with ε‑bounded constraint violation. The authors validate PGP with ablations on a grid‑world benchmark and demonstrate scalability on two challenging continuous‑control tasks.
By Florian Wolf, Ilyas Fatkhullin, Niao He
arXiv:2507. 11366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study online optimization methods for zero-sum games, a fundamental problem in adversarial learning in machine learning, economics, and many other domains.
By Taemin Kim, James P. Bailey