A mean-field analysis of two-player zero-sum games

Carles Domingo-Enrich, Samy Jelassi, Arthur Mensch, Grant Rotskoff, Joan Bruna

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

Finding Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum continuous games is a central problem in machine learning, e.g. for training both GANs and robust models. The existence of pure Nash equilibria requires strong conditions which are not typically met in practice. Mixed Nash equilibria exist in greater generality and may be found using mirror descent. Yet this approach does not scale to high dimensions. To address this limitation, we parametrize mixed strategies as mixtures of particles, whose positions and weights are updated using gradient descent-ascent. We study this dynamics as an interacting gradient flow over measure spaces endowed with the Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao metric. We establish global convergence to an approximate equilibrium for the related Langevin gradient-ascent dynamic. We prove a law of large numbers that relates particle dynamics to mean-field dynamics. Our method identifies mixed equilibria in high dimensions and is demonstrably effective for training mixtures of GANs.

Original languageEnglish (US)
JournalAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume2020-December
StatePublished - 2020
Event34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Dec 6 2020Dec 12 2020

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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