Computing Equilibria in Games with Stochastic Action Sets

Thomas Schwarz, Ryann Sim, Chun Kai Ling

Keywords: zero-sum games, stochastic action sets, equilibrium representation, equilibrium computation, no-regret learning

TL;DR: We study games where players have stochastic restrictions to their action sets, and give an efficient algorithm that computes compactly represented Nash equilibria.

Abstract: The study of learning in games typically assumes that each player always has access to all of their actions. However, in many practical scenarios, arbitrary restrictions induced by exogenous stochasticity might be placed on a player's action set. To model this setting, for a game $\mathcal{G}_{\mathrm{orig}}$ with action set $A_i$ for each player $i$, we introduce the corresponding Game with Stochastic Action Sets (GSAS) which is parametrized by a probability distribution over the players' set of possible action subsets $\mathcal{S}_i \subseteq 2^{\vert A_i\vert}\backslash\{\varnothing\}$. In a GSAS, players' strategies and Nash equilibria (NE) admit prohibitively large representations, thus existing algorithms for NE computation scale poorly. Under the assumption that action availabilities are independent between players, we show that NE in two-player zero-sum (2p0s) GSAS can be compactly represented by a vector of size $\vert A_i\vert$, overcoming naive exponential sized representation of equilibria. Computationally, we introduce an efficient approach based on sleeping internal regret minimization and show that it converges to approximate NE in 2p0s-GSAS at a rate $O(\sqrt{\log\vert A_i\vert/T})$ with appropriate choice of stepsizes, avoiding exponential blow-up of game-dependent constants.

Track: Long Paper

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Submission Number: 100