Multi-team games, prevalent in robotics and resource management, involve team members striving for a joint best response against other teams. Team-Nash equilibrium (TNE) predicts the outcomes of such coordinated interactions. However, can teams of self-interested agents reach TNE? We introduce Team-Fictitious Play (Team-FP), a new variant of fictitious play where agents respond to the last actions of team members and the beliefs formed about other teams with some inertia in action updates. This design is essential in team coordination beyond the classical fictitious play dynamics. We focus on zero-sum potential team games (ZSPTGs) where teams can interact pairwise while the team members do not necessarily have identical payoffs. We show that Team-FP reaches near TNE in ZSPTGs with a quantifiable error bound. We extend Team-FP dynamics to multi-team Markov games for model-based and model-free cases. The convergence analysis tackles the challenge of non-stationarity induced by evolving opponent strategies based on the optimal coupling lemma and stochastic differential inclusion approximation methods. Our work strengthens the foundation for using TNE to predict the behavior of decentralized teams and offers a practical rule for team learning in multi-team environments. We provide extensive simulations of Team-FP dynamics and compare its performance with other widely studied dynamics such as smooth fictitious play and multiplicative weights update. We further explore how different parameters impact the speed of convergence.

The goal of intersection management is to organize vehicles to pass the intersection safely and efficiently. Due to the technical advance of connected and autonomous vehicles, intersection management becomes more intelligent and potentially unsignalized. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement-learning-based methodology to train a centralized intersection manager. We define the intersection scheduling problem with a graph-based model and transform it to the job-shop scheduling problem (JSSP) with additional constraints. To utilize reinforcement learning, we model the scheduling procedure as a Markov decision process (MDP) and train the agent with the proximal policy optimization (PPO). A grouping strategy is also developed to apply the trained model to streams of vehicles. Experimental results show that the learning-based intersection manager is especially effective with high traffic densities. This paper is the first work in the literature to apply reinforcement learning on the graph-based intersection model. The proposed methodology can flexibly deal with any conflicting scenario and indicate the applicability of reinforcement learning to Intelligent intersection management.

Certain but important classes of strategic-form games, including zero-sum and identical-interest games, have thefictitious-play-property (FPP), i.e., beliefs formed in fictitious play dynamics always converge to a Nash equilibrium (NE) in the repeated play of these games. Such convergence results are seen as a (behavioral) justification for the game-theoretical equilibrium analysis. Markov games (MGs), also known as stochastic games, generalize the repeated play of strategic-form games to dynamic multi-state settings with Markovian state transitions. In particular, MGs are standard models for multi-agent reinforcement learning -- a reviving research area in learning and games, and their game-theoretical equilibrium analyses have also been conducted extensively. However, whether certain classes of MGs have the FPP or not (i.e., whether there is a behavioral justification for equilibrium analysis or not) remains largely elusive. In this paper, we study a new variant of fictitious play dynamics for MGs and show its convergence to an NE in n-player identical-interest MGs in which a single player controls the state transitions. Such games are of interest in communications, control, and economics applications. Our result together with the recent results in [42] establishes the FPP of two-player zero-sum MGs and n-player identical-interest MGs with a single controller (standing at two different ends of the MG spectrum from fully competitive to fully cooperative).

We study multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in infinite-horizon discounted zero-sum Markov games. We focus on the practical but challenging setting of decentralized MARL, where agents make decisions without coordination by a centralized controller, but only based on their own payoffs and local actions executed. The agents need not observe the opponent's actions or payoffs, possibly being even oblivious to the presence of the opponent, nor be aware of the zero-sum structure of the underlying game, a setting also referred to as radically uncoupled in the literature of learning in games. In this paper, we develop a radically uncoupled Q-learning dynamics that is both rational and convergent: the learning dynamics converges to the best response to the opponent's strategy when the opponent follows an asymptotically stationary strategy; when both agents adopt the learning dynamics, they converge to the Nash equilibrium of the game. The key challenge in this decentralized setting is the non-stationarity of the environment from an agent's perspective, since both her own payoffs and the system evolution depend on the actions of other agents, and each agent adapts her policies simultaneously and independently. To address this issue, we develop a two-timescale learning dynamics where each agent updates her local Q-function and value function estimates concurrently, with the latter happening at a slower timescale.

In this paper, we propose a game theoretical adversarial intervention detection mechanism for reliable smart road signs. A future trend in intelligent transportation systems is “smart road signs” that incorporate smart codes (e.g., visible at infrared) on their surface to provide more detailed information to smart vehicles. Such smart codes make road sign classification problem aligned with communication settings more than conventional classification. This enables us to integrate well-established results in communication theory, e.g., error-correction methods, into road sign classification problem. Recently, vision-based road sign classification algorithms have been shown to be vulnerable against (even) small scale adversarial interventions that are imperceptible for humans. On the other hand, smart codes constructed via error-correction methods can lead to robustness against small scale intelligent or random perturbations on them. In the recognition of smart road signs, however, humans are out of the loop since they cannot see or interpret them. Therefore, there is no equivalent concept of imperceptible perturbations in order to achieve a comparable performance with humans. Robustness against small scale perturbations would not be sufficient since the attacker can attack more aggressively without such a constraint. Under a game theoretical solution concept, we seek to ensure certain measure of guarantees against even the worst case (intelligent) attackers that can perturb the signal even at large scale. We provide a randomized detection strategy based on the distance between the decoder output and the received input, i.e., error rate. Finally, we examine the performance of the proposed scheme over various scenarios.

We propose a new information-driven intersection control to enhance the quality of transportation by using communication between vehicles and roadside units. The state-of-the-art solutions for intersection control only have access to the sensor data that is collected by vehicles or roadside units. However, congestion at intersections can have different impact on different drivers, and yet such an impact cannot be measured by sensors. An effective intersection control can consider such driver-exclusive differences based on the information reported by the drivers, which can substantially enhance the quality of transportation. However, such information is driver-exclusive, i.e., not verifiable easily, and therefore prone to be misreported strategically. We propose strategy-proof intersection control addressing such issues via a payment-based incentive-compatible mechanism. Particularly, vehicles at close proximity of the intersection report their driver-exclusive utility functions that they want to maximize (not necessarily truthfully), while the roadside unit seeks to maximize the sum of those utilities, i.e., social welfare, by scheduling intersection usage and charging each vehicle an amount of time-tokens corresponding to their impact on other drivers. This approach, based on the Vickrey-Clarke-Groove mechanism, guarantees truthful utility reporting by the vehicles and, correspondingly, maximizes the social welfare. The proposed scheme is universal such that it can be implemented based on various utility functions or intersection control constraints. We also provide a practical implementation to analyze the performance via numerical simulations.

With the fast development of autonomous driving and vehicular communication technologies, intelligent transportation systems that are based on VANET (Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network) have shown great promise. For instance, through V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) and V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) communication, intelligent intersections allow more fine-grained control of vehicle crossings and significantly enhance traffic efficiency. However, the performance and safety of these VANET-based systems could be seriously impaired by communication delays and packet losses, which may be caused by network congestion or by malicious attacks that target communication timing behavior. In this paper, we quantitatively model and analyze some of the timing and security issues in transportation networks with VANET-based intelligent intersections. In particular, we demonstrate how communication delays may affect the performance and safety of a single intersection and of multiple interconnected intersections, and present our delay-tolerant intersection management protocols. We also discuss the issues of such protocols when the vehicles are non-cooperative and how they may be addressed with game theory.

We study online nonlinear learning over distributed multiagent systems, where each agent employs a single hidden layer feedforward neural network (SLFN) structure to sequentially minimize arbitrary loss functions. In particular, each agent trains its own SLFN using only the data that is revealed to itself. On the other hand, the aim of the multiagent system is to train the SLFN at each agent as well as the optimal centralized batch SLFN that has access to all the data, by exchanging information between neighboring agents. We address this problem by introducing a distributed subgradient-based extreme learning machine algorithm. The proposed algorithm provides guaranteed upper bounds on the performance of the SLFN at each agent and shows that each of these individual SLFNs asymptotically achieves the performance of the optimal centralized batch SLFN. Our performance guarantees explicitly distinguish the effects of data- and network-dependent parameters on the convergence rate of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed algorithm achieves the oracle performance significantly faster than the state-of-the-art methods in the machine learning and signal processing literature. Hence, the proposed method is highly appealing for the applications involving big data.

We investigate the problem of sequential piecewise linear regression from a competitive framework. For an arbitrary and unknown data length n, we first introduce a method to partition the regressor space. Particularly, we present a recursive method that divides the regressor space into O(n) disjoint regions that can result in approximately 1.5ndifferent piecewise linear models on the regressor space. For each region, we introduce a universal linear regressor whose performance is nearly as well as the best linear regressor whose parameters are set non-causally. We then use an infinite depth context tree to represent all piecewise linear models and introduce a universal algorithm to achieve the performance of the best piecewise linear model that can be selected in hindsight. In this sense, the introduced algorithm is twice-universal such that it sequentially achieves the performance of the best model that uses the optimal regression parameters. Our algorithm achieves this performance only with a computational complexity upper bounded by O(n) in the worst-case and O(log(n)) under certain regularity conditions. We provide the explicit description of the algorithm as well as the upper bounds on the regret with respect to the best nonlinear and piecewise linear models, and demonstrate the performance of the algorithm through simulations.

We present a novel family of adaptive filtering algorithms based on a relative logarithmic cost. The new family intrinsically combines the higher and lower order measures of the error into a single continuous update based on the error amount. We introduce the least mean logarithmic square (LMLS) algorithm that achieves comparable convergence performance with the least mean fourth (LMF) algorithm and overcomes the stability issues of the LMF algorithm. In addition, we introduce the least logarithmic absolute difference (LLAD) algorithm. The LLAD and least mean square (LMS) algorithms demonstrate similar convergence performance in impulse-free noise environments while the LLAD algorithm is robust against impulsive interference and outperforms the sign algorithm (SA).

We provide a logarithmic upper-bound on the regret function of the diffusion implementation for the distributed estimation. For certain learning rates, the bound shows guaranteed performance convergence of the distributed least mean square (DLMS) algorithms to the performance of the best estimation generated with hindsight of spatial and temporal data. We use a new cost definition for distributed estimation based on the widely-used statistical performance measures and the corresponding global regret function. Then, for certain learning rates, we provide an upper-bound on the global regret function without any statistical assumptions.

We introduce novel diffusion based adaptive estimation strategies for distributed networks that have significantly less communication load and achieve comparable performance to the full information exchange configurations. After local estimates of the desired data is produced in each node, a single bit of information (or a reduced dimensional data vector) is generated using certain random projections of the local estimates. This newly generated data is diffused and then used in neighboring nodes to recover the original full information. We provide the complete state-space description and the mean stability analysis of our algorithms.