Impact of Decentralized Learning on Player Utilities in Stackelberg Games

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Donahue, Kate, Immorlica, Nicole, Jagadeesan, Meena, Lucier, Brendan, Slivkins, Aleksandrs
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Donahue, Kate
Immorlica, Nicole
Jagadeesan, Meena
Lucier, Brendan
Slivkins, Aleksandrs
author_facet Donahue, Kate
Immorlica, Nicole
Jagadeesan, Meena
Lucier, Brendan
Slivkins, Aleksandrs
contents When deployed in the world, a learning agent such as a recommender system or a chatbot often repeatedly interacts with another learning agent (such as a user) over time. In many such two-agent systems, each agent learns separately and the rewards of the two agents are not perfectly aligned. To better understand such cases, we examine the learning dynamics of the two-agent system and the implications for each agent's objective. We model these systems as Stackelberg games with decentralized learning and show that standard regret benchmarks (such as Stackelberg equilibrium payoffs) result in worst-case linear regret for at least one player. To better capture these systems, we construct a relaxed regret benchmark that is tolerant to small learning errors by agents. We show that standard learning algorithms fail to provide sublinear regret, and we develop algorithms to achieve near-optimal $O(T^{2/3})$ regret for both players with respect to these benchmarks. We further design relaxed environments under which faster learning ($O(\sqrt{T})$) is possible. Altogether, our results take a step towards assessing how two-agent interactions in sequential and decentralized learning environments affect the utility of both agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_00188
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Impact of Decentralized Learning on Player Utilities in Stackelberg Games
Donahue, Kate
Immorlica, Nicole
Jagadeesan, Meena
Lucier, Brendan
Slivkins, Aleksandrs
Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
When deployed in the world, a learning agent such as a recommender system or a chatbot often repeatedly interacts with another learning agent (such as a user) over time. In many such two-agent systems, each agent learns separately and the rewards of the two agents are not perfectly aligned. To better understand such cases, we examine the learning dynamics of the two-agent system and the implications for each agent's objective. We model these systems as Stackelberg games with decentralized learning and show that standard regret benchmarks (such as Stackelberg equilibrium payoffs) result in worst-case linear regret for at least one player. To better capture these systems, we construct a relaxed regret benchmark that is tolerant to small learning errors by agents. We show that standard learning algorithms fail to provide sublinear regret, and we develop algorithms to achieve near-optimal $O(T^{2/3})$ regret for both players with respect to these benchmarks. We further design relaxed environments under which faster learning ($O(\sqrt{T})$) is possible. Altogether, our results take a step towards assessing how two-agent interactions in sequential and decentralized learning environments affect the utility of both agents.
title Impact of Decentralized Learning on Player Utilities in Stackelberg Games
topic Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00188