On Tractable $Φ$-Equilibria in Non-Concave Games

Abstract

While Online Gradient Descent and other no-regret learning procedures are known to efficiently converge to a coarse correlated equilibrium in games where each agent's utility is concave in their own strategy, this is not the case when utilities are non-concave -- a common scenario in machine learning applications involving strategies parameterized by deep neural networks, or when agents' utilities are computed by neural networks, or both. Non-concave games introduce significant game-theoretic and optimization challenges: (i) Nash equilibria may not exist; (ii) local Nash equilibria, though they exist, are intractable; and (iii) mixed Nash, correlated, and coarse correlated equilibria generally have infinite support and are intractable. To sidestep these challenges, we revisit the classical solution concept of $Φ$-equilibria introduced by Greenwald and Jafari [2003], which is guaranteed to exist for an arbitrary set of strategy modifications $Φ$ even in non-concave games [Stolz and Lugosi, 2007]. However, the tractability of $Φ$-equilibria in such games remains elusive. In this paper, we initiate the study of tractable $Φ$-equilibria in non-concave games and examine several natural families of strategy modifications. We show that when $Φ$ is finite, there exists an efficient uncoupled learning algorithm that converges to the corresponding $Φ$-equilibria. Additionally, we explore cases where $Φ$ is infinite but consists of local modifications. We show that approximating local $Φ$-equilibria beyond the first-order stationary regime is computationally intractable. In contrast, within this regime, we show Online Gradient Descent efficiently converges to $Φ$-equilibria for several natural infinite families of modifications, including a new structural family of modifications inspired by the well-studied proximal operator.