Deep learning has proven to be effective in a wide variety of loss minimization problems. However, many applications of interest, like minimizing projected Bellman error and min-max optimization, cannot be modelled as minimizing a scalar loss function but instead correspond to solving a variational inequality (VI) problem. This difference in setting has caused many practical challenges as naive gradient-based approaches from supervised learning tend to diverge and cycle in the VI case. In this work, we propose a principled surrogate-based approach compatible with deep learning to solve VIs. We show that our surrogate-based approach has three main benefits: (1) under assumptions that are realistic in practice (when hidden monotone structure is present, interpolation, and sufficient optimization of the surrogates), it guarantees convergence, (2) it provides a unifying perspective of existing methods, and (3) is amenable to existing deep learning optimizers like ADAM. Experimentally, we demonstrate our surrogate-based approach is effective in min-max optimization and minimizing projected Bellman error. Furthermore, in the deep reinforcement learning case, we propose a novel variant of TD(0) which is more compute and sample efficient.

The Polyak stepsize has been proven to be a fundamental stepsize in convex optimization, giving near optimal gradient descent rates across a wide range of assumptions. The universality of the Polyak stepsize has also inspired many stochastic variants, with theoretical guarantees and strong empirical performance. Despite the many theoretical results, our understanding of the convergence properties and shortcomings of the Polyak stepsize or its variants is both incomplete and fractured across different analyses. We propose a new, unified, and simple perspective for the Polyak stepsize and its variants as gradient descent on a surrogate loss. We show that each variant is equivalent to minimize a surrogate function with stepsizes that adapt to a guaranteed local curvature. Our general surrogate loss perspective is then used to provide a unified analysis of existing variants across different assumptions. Moreover, we show a number of negative results proving that the non-convergence results in some of the upper bounds is indeed real.

In their seminal work, Nayyar et al. (2013) showed that imperfect information can be abstracted away from common-payoff games by having players publicly announce their policies as they play. This insight underpins sound solvers and decision-time planning algorithms for common-payoff games. Unfortunately, a naive application of the same insight to two-player zero-sum games fails because Nash equilibria of the game with public policy announcements may not correspond to Nash equilibria of the original game. As a consequence, existing sound decision-time planning algorithms require complicated additional mechanisms that have unappealing properties. The main contribution of this work is showing that certain regularized equilibria do not possess the aforementioned non-correspondence problem—thus, computing them can be treated as perfect-information problems. Because these regularized equilibria can be made arbitrarily close to Nash equilibria, our result opens the door to a new perspective to solving two-player zero-sum games and yields a simplified framework for decision-time planning in two-player zero-sum games, void of the unappealing properties that plague existing decision-time planning approaches.

Driven by recent successes in two-player, zero-sum game solving and playing, artificial intelligence work on games has increasingly focused on algorithms that produce equilibrium-based strategies. However, this approach has been less effective at producing competent players in general-sum games or those with more than two players than in two-player, zero-sum games. An appealing alternative is to consider adaptive algorithms that ensure strong performance in hindsight relative to what could have been achieved with modified behavior. This approach also leads to a game-theoretic analysis, but in the correlated play that arises from joint learning dynamics rather than factored agent behavior at equilibrium. We develop and advocate for this hindsight rationality framing of learning in general sequential decision-making settings. To this end, we re-examine mediated equilibrium and deviation types in extensive-form games, thereby gaining a more complete understanding and resolving past misconceptions. We present a set of examples illustrating the distinct strengths and weaknesses of each type of equilibrium in the literature, and prove that no tractable concept subsumes all others. This line of inquiry culminates in the definition of the deviation and equilibrium classes that correspond to algorithms in the counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) family, relating them to all others in the literature. Examining CFR in greater detail further leads to a new recursive definition of rationality in correlated play that extends sequential rationality in a way that naturally applies to hindsight evaluation.

For artificially intelligent learning systems to have widespread applicability in real-world settings, it is important that they be able to operate decentrally. Unfortunately, decentralized control is difficult---computing even an epsilon-optimal joint policy is a NEXP complete problem. Nevertheless, a recently rediscovered insight---that a team of agents can coordinate via common knowledge---has given rise to algorithms capable of finding optimal joint policies in small common-payoff games. The Bayesian action decoder (BAD) leverages this insight and deep reinforcement learning to scale to games as large as two-player Hanabi. However, the approximations it uses to do so prevent it from discovering optimal joint policies even in games small enough to brute force optimal solutions. This work proposes CAPI, a novel algorithm which, like BAD, combines common knowledge with deep reinforcement learning. However, unlike BAD, CAPI prioritizes the propensity to discover optimal joint policies over scalability. While this choice precludes CAPI from scaling to games as large as Hanabi, empirical results demonstrate that, on the games to which CAPI does scale, it is capable of discovering optimal joint policies even when other modern multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms are unable to do so.

Hindsight rationality is an approach to playing general-sum games that prescribes no-regret learning dynamics for individual agents with respect to a set of deviations, and further describes jointly rational behavior among multiple agents with mediated equilibria. To develop hindsight rational learning in sequential decision-making settings, we formalize behavioral deviations as a general class of deviations that respect the structure of extensive-form games. Integrating the idea of time selection into counterfactual regret minimization (CFR), we introduce the extensive-form regret minimization (EFR) algorithm that achieves hindsight rationality for any given set of behavioral deviations with computation that scales closely with the complexity of the set. We identify behavioral deviation subsets, the partial sequence deviation types, that subsume previously studied types and lead to efficient EFR instances in games with moderate lengths. In addition, we present a thorough empirical analysis of EFR instantiated with different deviation types in benchmark games, where we find that stronger types typically induce better performance.

Accurate models of patient survival probabilities provide important information to clinicians prescribing care for life-threatening and terminal ailments. A recently developed class of models -- known as individual survival distributions (ISDs) -- produces patient-specific survival functions that offer greater descriptive power of patient outcomes than was previously possible. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, ISD models almost universally lack uncertainty quantification. In this paper we demonstrate that an existing method for estimating simultaneous prediction intervals from samples can easily be adapted for patient-specific survival curve analysis and yields accurate results. Furthermore, we introduce both a modification to the existing method and a novel method for estimating simultaneous prediction intervals and show that they offer competitive performance. It is worth emphasizing that these methods are not limited to survival analysis and can be applied in any context in which sampling the distribution of interest is tractable. Code is available at https://github.com/ssokota/spie.