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Advances in generative modeling and adversarial learning have given rise to renewed interest in smooth games. However, the absence of symmetry in the matrix of second derivatives poses challenges that are not present in the classical minimization framework. While a rich theory of average-case analysis has been developed for minimization problems, little is known in the context of smooth games. In this work we take a first step towards closing this gap by developing average-case optimal first-order methods for a subset of smooth games. We make the following three main contributions. First, we show that for zero-sum bilinear games the average-case optimal method is the optimal method for the minimization of the Hamiltonian. Second, we provide an explicit expression for the optimal method corresponding to normal matrices, potentially non-symmetric. Finally, we specialize it to matrices with eigenvalues located in a disk and show a provable speed-up compared to worst-case optimal algorithms. We illustrate our findings through benchmarks with a varying degree of mismatch with our assumptions.
We study the stochastic bilinear minimax optimization problem, presenting an analysis of the Stochastic ExtraGradient (SEG) method with constant step size, and presenting variations of the method that yield favorable convergence. We first note that the last iterate of the basic SEG method only contracts to a fixed neighborhood of the Nash equilibrium, independent of the step size. This contrasts sharply with the standard setting of minimization where standard stochastic algorithms converge to a neighborhood that vanishes in proportion to the square-root (constant) step size. Under the same setting, however, we prove that when augmented with iteration averaging, SEG provably converges to the Nash equilibrium, and such a rate is provably accelerated by incorporating a scheduled restarting procedure. In the interpolation setting, we achieve an optimal convergence rate up to tight constants. We present numerical experiments that validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the SEG method when equipped with iteration averaging and restarting.
We develop a framework for the average-case analysis of random quadratic problems and derive algorithms that are optimal under this analysis. This yields a new class of methods that achieve acceleration given a model of the Hessians eigenvalue distribution. We develop explicit algorithms for the uniform, Marchenko-Pastur, and exponential distributions. These methods are momentum-based algorithms, whose hyper-parameters can be estimated without knowledge of the Hessians smallest singular value, in contrast with classical accelerated methods like Nesterov acceleration and Polyak momentum. Through empirical benchmarks on quadratic and logistic regression problems, we identify regimes in which the the proposed methods improve over classical (worst-case) accelerated methods.
Stochastic differential games have been used extensively to model agents competitions in Finance, for instance, in P2P lending platforms from the Fintech industry, the banking system for systemic risk, and insurance markets. The recently proposed machine learning algorithm, deep fictitious play, provides a novel efficient tool for finding Markovian Nash equilibrium of large $N$-player asymmetric stochastic differential games [J. Han and R. Hu, Mathematical and Scientific Machine Learning Conference, pages 221-245, PMLR, 2020]. By incorporating the idea of fictitious play, the algorithm decouples the game into $N$ sub-optimization problems, and identifies each players optimal strategy with the deep backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE) method parallelly and repeatedly. In this paper, we prove the convergence of deep fictitious play (DFP) to the true Nash equilibrium. We can also show that the strategy based on DFP forms an $eps$-Nash equilibrium. We generalize the algorithm by proposing a new approach to decouple the games, and present numerical results of large population games showing the empirical convergence of the algorithm beyond the technical assumptions in the theorems.
In this work, we study the interaction of strategic agents in continuous action Cournot games with limited information feedback. Cournot game is the essential market model for many socio-economic systems where agents learn and compete without the full knowledge of the system or each other. We consider the dynamics of the policy gradient algorithm, which is a widely adopted continuous control reinforcement learning algorithm, in concave Cournot games. We prove the convergence of policy gradient dynamics to the Nash equilibrium when the price function is linear or the number of agents is two. This is the first result (to the best of our knowledge) on the convergence property of learning algorithms with continuous action spaces that do not fall in the no-regret class.
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.