Approximating Nash Equilibria in General-Sum Games via Meta-Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18868v1
• Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2025 09:33:50 GMT
• Title: Approximating Nash Equilibria in General-Sum Games via Meta-Learning
• Authors: David Sychrovský, Christopher Solinas, Revan MacQueen, Kevin Wang, James R. Wright, Nathan R. Sturtevant, Michael Bowling,
• Abstract summary: We use meta-learning to minimize correlations in strategies produced by a regret minimizer.<n>Our algorithms provide significantly better approximations of Nash equilibria than state-of-the-art regret minimization techniques.
• Score: 18.688759383834345
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Nash equilibrium is perhaps the best-known solution concept in game theory. Such a solution assigns a strategy to each player which offers no incentive to unilaterally deviate. While a Nash equilibrium is guaranteed to always exist, the problem of finding one in general-sum games is PPAD-complete, generally considered intractable. Regret minimization is an efficient framework for approximating Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum games. However, in general-sum games, such algorithms are only guaranteed to converge to a coarse-correlated equilibrium (CCE), a solution concept where players can correlate their strategies. In this work, we use meta-learning to minimize the correlations in strategies produced by a regret minimizer. This encourages the regret minimizer to find strategies that are closer to a Nash equilibrium. The meta-learned regret minimizer is still guaranteed to converge to a CCE, but we give a bound on the distance to Nash equilibrium in terms of our meta-loss. We evaluate our approach in general-sum imperfect information games. Our algorithms provide significantly better approximations of Nash equilibria than state-of-the-art regret minimization techniques.

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