arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Paradoxes of Game Theoretic Equilibria and Price of Anarchy

arXiv:2607. 11752v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For decades, static solution concepts (Nash, Correlated, and Coarse Correlated Equilibria) and the Price of Anarchy (PoA) have formed the bedrock of algorithmic game theory, with no-regret learning proving fast convergence to such game-theoretic equilibria.

By Georgios Piliouras, Ian Gemp, Siqi Liu, Luke Marris
arXiv AI
Sep 24

ANO: Robust Policy Optimization via Bounded, Redescending Gain Fields

The paper introduces Anchored Neighborhood Optimization (ANO), a new policy‑optimization method that directly designs a smooth, bounded gain field for the probability‑ratio surrogate objective. ANO anchors the identity map at a ratio of one, peaks at a specified trust‑region boundary, and limits the influence of extreme off‑policy samples while providing a bounded, redescending pull on outliers. Empirical results show ANO consistently outperforms existing methods on Atari and MuJoCo benchmarks, and it remains robust under aggressive learning‑rate settings.

By Yiheng Zhang, Yiming Wang, Kaiyan Zhao, Zhenglin Wan, Jiayu Chen, Leong Hou U
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

Fast Regularized Policy Mirror Descent with One-Step TD Updates

The paper introduces Fast Regularized Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) that pairs policy updates with a single temporal-difference (TD) critic step. It proves global linear convergence for finite discounted MDPs using exact coordinate-wise Bellman updates and any positive actor stepsize, regardless of critic initialization. For stochastic TD-PMD with strongly convex mirror maps, the authors achieve an expected value gap of ε after “~O(1/((1-γ)^5 σ_b ε))” transitions, without requiring trajectory resets, generative models, or nested policy evaluation loops.

By Qipei Chen, Wenye Li, Yule Sun, Ke Wei
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 13

Paradoxes of Game Theoretic Equilibria and Price of Anarchy

For decades, static solution concepts (Nash, Correlated, and Coarse Correlated Equilibria) and the Price of Anarchy (PoA) have formed the bedrock of algorithmic game theory, with no-regret learning proving fast convergence to such game-theoretic equilibria. We show that reducing multi-agent learning to static equilibrium and black-box regret analysis obscures underlying dynamic disequilibrium and game theoretic bounds.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

Scalable Policy Optimization for Networked Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Continuous State-Action Spaces

arXiv:2607. 18554v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop the Continuous Distributed Coupled Policy Gradient (CDCPG) algorithm for cooperative reinforcement learning in networked Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces.

By Dongming Wang, Pengcheng Dai, Wenwu Yu, Wei Ren