13,205 research outputs found
Theoretical and Practical Advances on Smoothing for Extensive-Form Games
Sparse iterative methods, in particular first-order methods, are known to be
among the most effective in solving large-scale two-player zero-sum
extensive-form games. The convergence rates of these methods depend heavily on
the properties of the distance-generating function that they are based on. We
investigate the acceleration of first-order methods for solving extensive-form
games through better design of the dilated entropy function---a class of
distance-generating functions related to the domains associated with the
extensive-form games. By introducing a new weighting scheme for the dilated
entropy function, we develop the first distance-generating function for the
strategy spaces of sequential games that has no dependence on the branching
factor of the player. This result improves the convergence rate of several
first-order methods by a factor of , where is the branching
factor of the player, and is the depth of the game tree.
Thus far, counterfactual regret minimization methods have been faster in
practice, and more popular, than first-order methods despite their
theoretically inferior convergence rates. Using our new weighting scheme and
practical tuning we show that, for the first time, the excessive gap technique
can be made faster than the fastest counterfactual regret minimization
algorithm, CFR+, in practice
Computing large market equilibria using abstractions
Computing market equilibria is an important practical problem for market
design (e.g. fair division, item allocation). However, computing equilibria
requires large amounts of information (e.g. all valuations for all buyers for
all items) and compute power. We consider ameliorating these issues by applying
a method used for solving complex games: constructing a coarsened abstraction
of a given market, solving for the equilibrium in the abstraction, and lifting
the prices and allocations back to the original market. We show how to bound
important quantities such as regret, envy, Nash social welfare, Pareto
optimality, and maximin share when the abstracted prices and allocations are
used in place of the real equilibrium. We then study two abstraction methods of
interest for practitioners: 1) filling in unknown valuations using techniques
from matrix completion, 2) reducing the problem size by aggregating groups of
buyers/items into smaller numbers of representative buyers/items and solving
for equilibrium in this coarsened market. We find that in real data
allocations/prices that are relatively close to equilibria can be computed from
even very coarse abstractions
The Complexity of Synthesizing Uniform Strategies
We investigate uniformity properties of strategies. These properties involve
sets of plays in order to express useful constraints on strategies that are not
\mu-calculus definable. Typically, we can state that a strategy is
observation-based. We propose a formal language to specify uniformity
properties, interpreted over two-player turn-based arenas equipped with a
binary relation between plays. This way, we capture e.g. games with winning
conditions expressible in epistemic temporal logic, whose underlying
equivalence relation between plays reflects the observational capabilities of
agents (for example, synchronous perfect recall). Our framework naturally
generalizes many other situations from the literature. We establish that the
problem of synthesizing strategies under uniformity constraints based on
regular binary relations between plays is non-elementary complete.Comment: In Proceedings SR 2013, arXiv:1303.007
Modal logics are coalgebraic
Applications of modal logics are abundant in computer science, and a large number of structurally different modal logics have been successfully employed in a diverse spectrum of application contexts. Coalgebraic semantics, on the other hand, provides a uniform and encompassing view on the large variety of specific logics used in particular domains. The coalgebraic approach is generic and compositional: tools and techniques simultaneously apply to a large class of application areas and can moreover be combined in a modular way. In particular, this facilitates a pick-and-choose approach to domain specific formalisms, applicable across the entire scope of application areas, leading to generic software tools that are easier to design, to implement, and to maintain. This paper substantiates the authors' firm belief that the systematic exploitation of the coalgebraic nature of modal logic will not only have impact on the field of modal logic itself but also lead to significant progress in a number of areas within computer science, such as knowledge representation and concurrency/mobility
Unifying Functional Interpretations: Past and Future
This article surveys work done in the last six years on the unification of
various functional interpretations including G\"odel's dialectica
interpretation, its Diller-Nahm variant, Kreisel modified realizability,
Stein's family of functional interpretations, functional interpretations "with
truth", and bounded functional interpretations. Our goal in the present paper
is twofold: (1) to look back and single out the main lessons learnt so far, and
(2) to look forward and list several open questions and possible directions for
further research.Comment: 18 page
Solving Large Extensive-Form Games with Strategy Constraints
Extensive-form games are a common model for multiagent interactions with
imperfect information. In two-player zero-sum games, the typical solution
concept is a Nash equilibrium over the unconstrained strategy set for each
player. In many situations, however, we would like to constrain the set of
possible strategies. For example, constraints are a natural way to model
limited resources, risk mitigation, safety, consistency with past observations
of behavior, or other secondary objectives for an agent. In small games,
optimal strategies under linear constraints can be found by solving a linear
program; however, state-of-the-art algorithms for solving large games cannot
handle general constraints. In this work we introduce a generalized form of
Counterfactual Regret Minimization that provably finds optimal strategies under
any feasible set of convex constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our
algorithm for finding strategies that mitigate risk in security games, and for
opponent modeling in poker games when given only partial observations of
private information.Comment: Appeared in AAAI 201
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