The paper introduces Regret-Weighted Payoff Sampling (RWPS), a budgeted estimator that selectively simulates only payoff-matrix cells relevant to a Nash equilibrium and uses a surrogate model for the remaining entries. RWPS provides an instance-dependent error bound weighted by the opponent’s equilibrium mixture and a coverage result guaranteeing that, once the deviation-relevant set is simulated, surrogate error does not affect either player’s regret. Experiments on three 21×21 general-sum games, including an asymmetric Colonel Blotto, show that RWPS achieves four to six times tighter bounds than previous methods and outperforms other sampling strategies on the CyGym and ANSG cyber simulators at low budgets.
arXiv:2608. 06362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deciding which of two agents is stronger means playing games until skill outweighs luck, and every game costs money, model inference, or expert time.
arXiv:2609.06816v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision-time search in perfect and imperfect information games with enumerable belief states are effective methods for game AI. Collectible card games...
arXiv:2606. 29169v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many important games have more than two players and imperfect information.
The paper investigates the problem of sharing a single critic across multiple parallel environments in reinforcement learning. It shows that when environments assign different expected returns to the same state, a shared critic must reconcile conflicting value targets, which can distort advantage estimates and misguide policy updates. The authors propose a simple fix—providing the critic with the environment index—demonstrating through bandit models and experiments on CartPole, MuJoCo, BipedalWalker, and 16 Procgen games that this conditional critic stabilizes learning and boosts returns, achieving a 40.8% improvement in aggregate normalized return on unseen levels.
The paper introduces Online Hyperparameter Optimization (OHPO), framing it as an infinitely many‑armed bandit problem over mixed and conditional search spaces. It proposes the IMABO framework, which couples any bandit policy with any oracle for proposing new configurations, and presents IMOSS—a restart‑free anytime policy with provable regret bounds. Experiments show that IMABO, combined with practical oracles such as TPE, an incumbent‑mutation oracle, and a pretrained tabular foundation model, outperforms random search across a range of settings from classical ML models to LLM‑based agents.
arXiv:2608. 15372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study generating game-theoretically optimized Courses of Action (COAs) for a Blue UAS swarm against an adaptive Red adversary in a communication-degraded environment, motivated by (but not derived from) a public U.
arXiv:2306. 02704v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce \emph{Calibrated Stackelberg Games (CSGs)}, a generalization of the standard Stackelberg Games (SGs) framework.
arXiv:2605.20854v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide the first regret analysis of ReMax in stochastic multi-armed bandits. Originally introduced for reinforcement learning, ReMax is motivat...
arXiv:2606. 06486v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study regret minimization in repeated games with \emph{adaptive} opponents who can respond based on histories of play.
arXiv:2609. 14959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study decentralized learning of Nash equilibria (NE) in infinite-horizon discounted Markov games under bandit feedback, focusing on Markov $\alpha$-potential games.
arXiv:2607. 02255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory for a long-horizon LLM agent is a contract about what each future decision is allowed to see.
arXiv:2606. 28308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many two-player zero-sum games admit not a unique Nash equilibrium but a convex set of them: a polytope of profiles that all share the minimax value V* yet prescribe different behaviour.