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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On the Power of Perturbation under Sampling in Solving Extensive-Form Games

Wataru Masaka; Mitsuki Sakamoto; Kenshi Abe; Kaito Ariu; Tuomas Sandholm; Atsushi Iwasaki · 2025 · arXiv

WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate

The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.

Abstract (excerpt)

We investigate how perturbation does and does not improve the Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) algorithm in solving imperfect-information extensive-form games under sampling, where payoffs are estimated from sampled trajectories. While optimistic algorithms are effective under full feedback, they often become unstable in the presence of sampling noise. Payoff perturbation offers a promising alternative for stabilizing learning and achieving \textit{last-iterate convergence}. We present a unified framework for \textit{Perturbed FTRL} algorithms and study two variants: PFTRL-KL (standard KL

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Metadata source: arXiv