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Poster

Efficient Φ-Regret Minimization with Low-Degree Swap Deviations in Extensive-Form Games

Brian Zhang · Ioannis Anagnostides · Gabriele Farina · Tuomas Sandholm

West Ballroom A-D #6611
[ ]
[ Paper [ Poster [ OpenReview
Thu 12 Dec 11 a.m. PST — 2 p.m. PST

Abstract: Recent breakthrough results by Dagan, Daskalakis, Fishelson and Golowich [2023] and Peng and Rubinstein [2023] established an efficient algorithm attaining at most ϵ swap regret over extensive-form strategy spaces of dimension N in NO~(1/ϵ) rounds. On the other extreme, Farina and Pipis [2023] developed an efficient algorithm for minimizing the weaker notion of linear-swap regret in poly(N)/ϵ2 rounds. In this paper, we develop efficient parameterized algorithms for regimes between these two extremes. We introduce the set of k-mediator deviations, which generalize the untimed communication deviations recently introduced by Zhang, Farina and Sandholm [2024] to the case of having multiple mediators, and we develop algorithms for minimizing the regret with respect to this set of deviations in NO(k)/ϵ2 rounds. Moreover, by relating k-mediator deviations to low-degree polynomials, we show that regret minimization against degree-k polynomial swap deviations is achievable in NO(kd)3/ϵ2 rounds, where d is the depth of the game, assuming a constant branching factor. For a fixed degree k, this is polynomial for Bayesian games and quasipolynomial more broadly when d=polylogN---the usual balancedness assumption on the game tree. The first key ingredient in our approach is a relaxation of the usual notion of a fixed point required in the framework of Gordon, Greenwald and Marks [2008]. Namely, for a given deviation ϕ, we show that it suffices to compute what we refer to as a fixed point in expectation; that is, a distribution π such that Exπ[ϕ(x)x]0. Unlike the problem of computing an actual (approximate) fixed point xϕ(x), which we show is \PPAD-hard, there is a simple and efficient algorithm for finding a solution that satisfies our relaxed notion. As a byproduct, we provide, to our knowledge, the fastest algorithm for computing ϵ-correlated equilibria in normal-form games in the medium-precision regime, obviating the need to solve a linear system in every round. Our second main contribution is a characterization of the set of low-degree deviations, made possible through a connection to low-depth decisions trees from Boolean analysis.

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