Two-Scale Gradient Descent Ascent Dynamics Finds Mixed Nash Equilibria of Continuous Games: A Mean-Field Perspective

Yulong Lu
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 202:22790-22811, 2023.

Abstract

Finding the mixed Nash equilibria (MNE) of a two-player zero sum continuous game is an important and challenging problem in machine learning. A canonical algorithm to finding the MNE is the noisy gradient descent ascent method which in the infinite particle limit gives rise to the Mean-Field Gradient Descent Ascent (GDA) dynamics on the space of probability measures. In this paper, we first study the convergence of a two-scale Mean-Field GDA dynamics for finding the MNE of the entropy-regularized objective. More precisely we show that for each finite temperature (or regularization parameter), the two-scale Mean-Field GDA with a suitable finite scale ratio converges exponentially to the unique MNE without assuming the convexity or concavity of the interaction potential. The key ingredient of our proof lies in the construction of new Lyapunov functions that dissipate exponentially along the Mean-Field GDA. We further study the simulated annealing of the Mean-Field GDA dynamics. We show that with a temperature schedule that decays logarithmically in time the annealed Mean-Field GDA converges to the MNE of the original unregularized objective.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v202-lu23b, title = {Two-Scale Gradient Descent Ascent Dynamics Finds Mixed {N}ash Equilibria of Continuous Games: A Mean-Field Perspective}, author = {Lu, Yulong}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {22790--22811}, year = {2023}, editor = {Krause, Andreas and Brunskill, Emma and Cho, Kyunghyun and Engelhardt, Barbara and Sabato, Sivan and Scarlett, Jonathan}, volume = {202}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {23--29 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/lu23b/lu23b.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/lu23b.html}, abstract = {Finding the mixed Nash equilibria (MNE) of a two-player zero sum continuous game is an important and challenging problem in machine learning. A canonical algorithm to finding the MNE is the noisy gradient descent ascent method which in the infinite particle limit gives rise to the Mean-Field Gradient Descent Ascent (GDA) dynamics on the space of probability measures. In this paper, we first study the convergence of a two-scale Mean-Field GDA dynamics for finding the MNE of the entropy-regularized objective. More precisely we show that for each finite temperature (or regularization parameter), the two-scale Mean-Field GDA with a suitable finite scale ratio converges exponentially to the unique MNE without assuming the convexity or concavity of the interaction potential. The key ingredient of our proof lies in the construction of new Lyapunov functions that dissipate exponentially along the Mean-Field GDA. We further study the simulated annealing of the Mean-Field GDA dynamics. We show that with a temperature schedule that decays logarithmically in time the annealed Mean-Field GDA converges to the MNE of the original unregularized objective.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Two-Scale Gradient Descent Ascent Dynamics Finds Mixed Nash Equilibria of Continuous Games: A Mean-Field Perspective %A Yulong Lu %B Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2023 %E Andreas Krause %E Emma Brunskill %E Kyunghyun Cho %E Barbara Engelhardt %E Sivan Sabato %E Jonathan Scarlett %F pmlr-v202-lu23b %I PMLR %P 22790--22811 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/lu23b.html %V 202 %X Finding the mixed Nash equilibria (MNE) of a two-player zero sum continuous game is an important and challenging problem in machine learning. A canonical algorithm to finding the MNE is the noisy gradient descent ascent method which in the infinite particle limit gives rise to the Mean-Field Gradient Descent Ascent (GDA) dynamics on the space of probability measures. In this paper, we first study the convergence of a two-scale Mean-Field GDA dynamics for finding the MNE of the entropy-regularized objective. More precisely we show that for each finite temperature (or regularization parameter), the two-scale Mean-Field GDA with a suitable finite scale ratio converges exponentially to the unique MNE without assuming the convexity or concavity of the interaction potential. The key ingredient of our proof lies in the construction of new Lyapunov functions that dissipate exponentially along the Mean-Field GDA. We further study the simulated annealing of the Mean-Field GDA dynamics. We show that with a temperature schedule that decays logarithmically in time the annealed Mean-Field GDA converges to the MNE of the original unregularized objective.
APA
Lu, Y.. (2023). Two-Scale Gradient Descent Ascent Dynamics Finds Mixed Nash Equilibria of Continuous Games: A Mean-Field Perspective. Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 202:22790-22811 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/lu23b.html.

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