Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017)
Amélie Heliou, Johanne Cohen, Panayotis Mertikopoulos
This paper examines the equilibrium convergence properties of no-regret learning with exponential weights in potential games. To establish convergence with minimal information requirements on the players' side, we focus on two frameworks: the semi-bandit case (where players have access to a noisy estimate of their payoff vectors, including strategies they did not play), and the bandit case (where players are only able to observe their in-game, realized payoffs). In the semi-bandit case, we show that the induced sequence of play converges almost surely to a Nash equilibrium at a quasi-exponential rate. In the bandit case, the same result holds for approximate Nash equilibria if we introduce a constant exploration factor that guarantees that action choice probabilities never become arbitrarily small. In particular, if the algorithm is run with a suitably decreasing exploration factor, the sequence of play converges to a bona fide Nash equilibrium with probability 1.