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            Free, publicly-accessible full text available January 1, 2026
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            Nash Equilibrium (NE) is the canonical solution concept of game theory, which provides an elegant tool to understand the rationalities. Though mixed strategy NE exists in any game with finite players and actions, computing NE in two- or multi-player general-sum games is PPAD-Complete. Various alternative solutions, e.g., Correlated Equilibrium (CE), and learning methods, e.g., fictitious play (FP), are proposed to approximate NE. For convenience, we call these methods as ``inexact solvers'', or ``solvers'' for short. However, the alternative solutions differ from NE and the learning methods generally fail to converge to NE. Therefore, in this work, we propose REinforcement Nash Equilibrium Solver (RENES), which trains a single policy to modify the games with different sizes and applies the solvers on the modified games where the obtained solution is evaluated on the original games. Specifically, our contributions are threefold. i) We represent the games as alpha-rank response graphs and leverage graph neural network (GNN) to handle the games with different sizes as inputs; ii) We use tensor decomposition, e.g., canonical polyadic (CP), to make the dimension of modifying actions fixed for games with different sizes; iii) We train the modifying strategy for games with the widely-used proximal policy optimization (PPO) and apply the solvers to solve the modified games, where the obtained solution is evaluated on original games. Extensive experiments on large-scale normal-form games show that our method can further improve the approximation of NE of different solvers, i.e., alpha-rank, CE, FP and PRD, and can be generalized to unseen games.more » « less
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            Policy-Space Response Oracles (PSRO) as a general algorithmic framework has achieved state-of-the-art performance in learning equilibrium policies of two-player zero-sum games. However, the hand-crafted hyperparameter value selection in most of the existing works requires extensive domain knowledge, forming the main barrier to applying PSRO to different games. In this work, we make the first attempt to investigate the possibility of self-adaptively determining the optimal hyperparameter values in the PSRO framework. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) Using several hyperparameters, we propose a parametric PSRO that unifies the gradient descent ascent (GDA) and different PSRO variants. (2) We propose the self-adaptive PSRO (SPSRO) by casting the hyperparameter value selection of the parametric PSRO as a hyperparameter optimization (HPO) problem where our objective is to learn an HPO policy that can self-adaptively determine the optimal hyperparameter values during the running of the parametric PSRO. (3) To overcome the poor performance of online HPO methods, we propose a novel offline HPO approach to optimize the HPO policy based on the Transformer architecture. Experiments on various two-player zero-sum games demonstrate the superiority of SPSRO over different baselines.more » « less
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