7 research outputs found
A Unified View of Large-scale Zero-sum Equilibrium Computation
The task of computing approximate Nash equilibria in large zero-sum
extensive-form games has received a tremendous amount of attention due mainly
to the Annual Computer Poker Competition. Immediately after its inception, two
competing and seemingly different approaches emerged---one an application of
no-regret online learning, the other a sophisticated gradient method applied to
a convex-concave saddle-point formulation. Since then, both approaches have
grown in relative isolation with advancements on one side not effecting the
other. In this paper, we rectify this by dissecting and, in a sense, unify the
two views.Comment: AAAI Workshop on Computer Poker and Imperfect Informatio
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
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