Policy Invariance under Reward Transformations for General-Sum Stochastic Games

Lu, X., Schwartz, H. M., Givigi, S. N.

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 

We extend the potential-based shaping method from Markov decision processes to multi-player general-sum stochastic games. We prove that the Nash equilibria in a stochastic game remains unchanged after potential-based shaping is applied to the environment. The property of policy invariance provides a possible way of speeding convergence when learning to play a stochastic game.