No Arabic abstract
The Team-maxmin equilibrium prescribes the optimal strategies for a team of rational players sharing the same goal and without the capability of correlating their strategies in strategic games against an adversary. This solution concept can capture situations in which an agent controls multiple resources-corresponding to the team members-that cannot communicate. It is known that such equilibrium always exists and it is unique (unless degeneracy) and these properties make it a credible solution concept to be used in real-world applications, especially in security scenarios. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, the Team-maxmin equilibrium is almost completely unexplored in the literature. In this paper, we investigate bounds of (in)efficiency of the Team-maxmin equilibrium w.r.t. the Nash equilibria and w.r.t. the Maxmin equilibrium when the team members can play correlated strategies. Furthermore, we study a number of algorithms to find and/or approximate an equilibrium, discussing their theoretical guarantees and evaluating their performance by using a standard testbed of game instances.
We provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first computational study of extensive-form adversarial team games. These games are sequential, zero-sum games in which a team of players, sharing the same utility function, faces an adversary. We define three different scenarios according to the communication capabilities of the team. In the first, the teammates can communicate and correlate their actions both before and during the play. In the second, they can only communicate before the play. In the third, no communication is possible at all. We define the most suitable solution concepts, and we study the inefficiency caused by partial or null communication, showing that the inefficiency can be arbitrarily large in the size of the game tree. Furthermore, we study the computational complexity of the equilibrium-finding problem in the three scenarios mentioned above, and we provide, for each of the three scenarios, an exact algorithm. Finally, we empirically evaluate the scalability of the algorithms in random games and the inefficiency caused by partial or null communication.
A dominant approach to solving large imperfect-information games is Counterfactural Regret Minimization (CFR). In CFR, many regret minimization problems are combined to solve the game. For very large games, abstraction is typically needed to render CFR tractable. Abstractions are often manually tuned, possibly removing important strategic differences in the full game and harming performance. Function approximation provides a natural solution to finding good abstractions to approximate the full game. A common approach to incorporating function approximation is to learn the inputs needed for a regret minimizing algorithm, allowing for generalization across many regret minimization problems. This paper gives regret bounds when a regret minimizing algorithm uses estimates instead of true values. This form of analysis is the first to generalize to a larger class of $(Phi, f)$-regret matching algorithms, and includes different forms of regret such as swap, internal, and external regret. We demonstrate how these results give a slightly tighter bound for Regression Regret-Matching (RRM), and present a novel bound for combining regression with Hedge.
We consider a multi-agent model for fair division of mixed manna (i.e. items for which agents can have positive, zero or negative utilities), in which agents have additive utilities for bundles of items. For this model, we give several general impossibility results and special possibility results for three common fairness concepts (i.e. EF1, EFX, EFX3) and one popular efficiency concept (i.e. PO). We also study how these interact with common welfare objectives such as the Nash, disutility Nash and egalitarian welfares. For example, we show that maximizing the Nash welfare with mixed manna (or minimizing the disutility Nash welfare) does not ensure an EF1 allocation whereas with goods and the Nash welfare it does. We also prove that an EFX3 allocation may not exist even with identical utilities. By comparison, with tertiary utilities, EFX and PO allocations, or EFX3 and PO allocations always exist. Also, with identical utilities, EFX and PO allocations always exist. For these cases, we give polynomial-time algorithms, returning such allocations and approximating further the Nash, disutility Nash and egalitarian welfares in special cases.
Prior AI breakthroughs in complex games have focused on either the purely adversarial or purely cooperative settings. In contrast, Diplomacy is a game of shifting alliances that involves both cooperation and competition. For this reason, Diplomacy has proven to be a formidable research challenge. In this paper we describe an agent for the no-press variant of Diplomacy that combines supervised learning on human data with one-step lookahead search via regret minimization. Regret minimization techniques have been behind previous AI successes in adversarial games, most notably poker, but have not previously been shown to be successful in large-scale games involving cooperation. We show that our agent greatly exceeds the performance of past no-press Diplomacy bots, is unexploitable by expert humans, and ranks in the top 2% of human players when playing anonymous games on a popular Diplomacy website.
We consider shared workspace scenarios with humans and robots acting to achieve independent goals, termed as parallel play. We model these as general-sum games and construct a framework that utilizes the Nash equilibrium solution concept to consider the interactive effect of both agents while planning. We find multiple Pareto-optimal equilibria in these tasks. We hypothesize that people act by choosing an equilibrium based on social norms and their personalities. To enable coordination, we infer the equilibrium online using a probabilistic model that includes these two factors and use it to select the robots action. We apply our approach to a close-proximity pick-and-place task involving a robot and a simulated human with three potential behaviors - defensive, selfish, and norm-following. We showed that using a Bayesian approach to infer the equilibrium enables the robot to complete the task with less than half the number of collisions while also reducing the task execution time as compared to the best baseline. We also performed a study with human participants interacting either with other humans or with different robot agents and observed that our proposed approach performs similar to human-human parallel play interactions. The code is available at https://github.com/shray/bayes-nash