Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userPoincare Recurrence, Cycles and Spurious Equilibria in Gradient-Descent-Ascent for Non-Convex Non-Concave Zero-Sum Games
102
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
We study a wide class of non-convex non-concave min-max games that generalizes over standard bilinear zero-sum games. In this class, players control the inputs of a smooth function whose output is being applied to a bilinear zero-sum game. This class of games is motivated by the indirect nature of the competition in Generative Adversarial Networks, where players control the parameters of a neural network while the actual competition happens between the distributions that the generator and discriminator capture. We establish theoretically, that depending on the specific instance of the problem gradient-descent-ascent dynamics can exhibit a variety of behaviors antithetical to convergence to the game theoretically meaningful min-max solution. Specifically, different forms of recurrent behavior (including periodicity and Poincare recurrence) are possible as well as convergence to spurious (non-min-max) equilibria for a positive measure of initial conditions. At the technical level, our analysis combines tools from optimization theory, game theory and dynamical systems.
rate research
Read More
Min-max saddle point games appear in a wide range of applications in machine leaning and signal processing. Despite their wide applicability, theoretical studies are mostly limited to the special convex-concave structure. While some recent works generalized these results to special smooth non-convex cases, our understanding of non-smooth scenarios is still limited. In this work, we study special form of non-smooth min-max games when the objective function is (strongly) convex with respect to one of the players decision variable. We show that a simple multi-step proximal gradient descent-ascent algorithm converges to $epsilon$-first-order Nash equilibrium of the min-max game with the number of gradient evaluations being polynomial in $1/epsilon$. We will also show that our notion of stationarity is stronger than existing ones in the literature. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm through adversarial attack on a LASSO estimator.
Many recent AI architectures are inspired by zero-sum games, however, the behavior of their dynamics is still not well understood. Inspired by this, we study standard gradient descent ascent (GDA) dynamics in a specific class of non-convex non-concave zero-sum games, that we call hidden zero-sum games. In this class, players control the inputs of smooth but possibly non-linear functions whose outputs are being applied as inputs to a convex-concave game. Unlike general zero-sum games, these games have a well-defined notion of solution; outcomes that implement the von-Neumann equilibrium of the hidden convex-concave game. We prove that if the hidden game is strictly convex-concave then vanilla GDA converges not merely to local Nash, but typically to the von-Neumann solution. If the game lacks strict convexity properties, GDA may fail to converge to any equilibrium, however, by applying standard regularization techniques we can prove convergence to a von-Neumann solution of a slightly perturbed zero-sum game. Our convergence guarantees are non-local, which as far as we know is a first-of-its-kind type of result in non-convex non-concave games. Finally, we discuss connections of our framework with generative adversarial networks.
In this paper we propose several adaptive gradient methods for stochastic optimization. Unlike AdaGrad-type of methods, our algorithms are based on Armijo-type line search and they simultaneously adapt to the unknown Lipschitz constant of the gradient and variance of the stochastic approximation for the gradient. We consider an accelerated and non-accelerated gradient descent for convex problems and gradient descent for non-convex problems. In the experiments we demonstrate superiority of our methods to existing adaptive methods, e.g. AdaGrad and Adam.
A dynamical system is defined in terms of the gradient of a payoff function. Dynamical variables are of two types, ascent and descent. The ascent variables move in the direction of the gradient, while the descent variables move in the opposite direction. Dynamical systems of this form or very similar forms have been studied in diverse fields such as game theory, optimization, neural networks, and population biology. Gradient descent-ascent is approximated as a Newtonian dynamical system that conserves total energy, defined as the sum of the kinetic energy and a potential energy that is proportional to the payoff function. The error of the approximation is a residual force that violates energy conservation. If the residual force is purely dissipative, then the energy serves as a Lyapunov function, and convergence of bounded trajectories to steady states is guaranteed. A previous convergence theorem due to Kose and Uzawa required the payoff function to be convex in the descent variables, and concave in the ascent variables. Here the assumption is relaxed, so that the payoff function need only be globally `less convex or `more concave in the ascent variables than in the descent variables. Such relative convexity conditions allow the existence of multiple steady states, unlike the convex-concave assumption. When combined with sufficient conditions that imply the existence of a minimax equilibrium, boundedness of trajectories is also assured.
In this paper we consider non zero-sum games where multiple players control the drift of a process, and their payoffs depend on its ergodic behaviour. We establish their connection with systems of Ergodic BSDEs, and prove the existence of a Nash equilibrium under the generalised Isaacs conditions. We also study the case of interacting players of different type.
suggested questions
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
