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 monotone game


Last-Iterate Guarantees for Learning in Co-coercive Games

Chandak, Siddharth, Tamizholi, Ramanan, Bambos, Nicholas

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We establish finite-time last-iterate guarantees for vanilla stochastic gradient descent in co-coercive games under noisy feedback. This is a broad class of games that is more general than strongly monotone games, allows for multiple Nash equilibria, and includes examples such as quadratic games with negative semidefinite interaction matrices and potential games with smooth concave potentials. Prior work in this setting has relied on relative noise models, where the noise vanishes as iterates approach equilibrium, an assumption that is often unrealistic in practice. We work instead under a substantially more general noise model in which the second moment of the noise is allowed to scale affinely with the squared norm of the iterates, an assumption natural in learning with unbounded action spaces. Under this model, we prove a last-iterate bound of order $O(\log(t)/t^{1/3})$, the first such bound for co-coercive games under non-vanishing noise. We additionally establish almost sure convergence of the iterates to the set of Nash equilibria and derive time-average convergence guarantees.







Multi-agent learning under uncertainty: Recurrence vs. concentration

Lotidis, Kyriakos, Mertikopoulos, Panayotis, Bambos, Nicholas, Blanchet, Jose

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we examine the convergence landscape of multi-agent learning under uncertainty. Specifically, we analyze two stochastic models of regularized learning in continuous games -- one in continuous and one in discrete time with the aim of characterizing the long-run behavior of the induced sequence of play. In stark contrast to deterministic, full-information models of learning (or models with a vanishing learning rate), we show that the resulting dynamics do not converge in general. In lieu of this, we ask instead which actions are played more often in the long run, and by how much. We show that, in strongly monotone games, the dynamics of regularized learning may wander away from equilibrium infinitely often, but they always return to its vicinity in finite time (which we estimate), and their long-run distribution is sharply concentrated around a neighborhood thereof. We quantify the degree of this concentration, and we show that these favorable properties may all break down if the underlying game is not strongly monotone -- underscoring in this way the limits of regularized learning in the presence of persistent randomness and uncertainty.