← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2606.01275 · v2
Domination-Avoiding Learning Agents Cannot Collude
首次提交 2026-05-31 22:57
版本更新 2026-11-03 21:34
雷达观测 2026-11-04 23:39
摘要
An influential paper of Calvano et al. empirically demonstrated that Q-learning agents spontaneously collude when placed as sellers that compete on prices in a natural market model. More recent results of Fish et al. empirically demonstrated that similar collusion happens with commercial LLMs. We formally prove that such collusion can also happen with external-regret-minimizing agents. We identify a very general class of agents, which we term Domination-Avoiding agents, that provably do not collude in such markets. This class contains all Mean-Based agents and all internal-regret-minimizing agents, as well as others such as Multiplicative-Weight agents with variable learning rate and contextual variants thereof. More generally we show that, in any game, this class of agents is guaranteed to jointly learn to almost never play strategies that are eliminated by repeated elimination of purely dominated strategies.
作者备注：27 pages, 1 figure. Accepted to NeurIPS 2026 (Spotlight). Camera-ready version
观测到的版本
相邻记录可能跳过中间版本；首次发现 v2 及以上也会标为版本更新。
v2 · 2026-11-03 21:34 · 最新观测版本
Domination-Avoiding Learning Agents Cannot Collude
An influential paper of Calvano et al. empirically demonstrated that Q-learning agents spontaneously collude when placed as sellers that compete on prices in a natural market model. More recent results of Fish et al. empirically demonstrated that similar collusion happens with commercial LLMs. We formally prove that such collusion can also happen with external-regret-minimizing agents. We identify a very general class of agents, which we term Domination-Avoiding agents, that provably do not collude in such markets. This class contains all Mean-Based agents and all internal-regret-minimizing agents, as well as others such as Multiplicative-Weight agents with variable learning rate and contextual variants thereof. More generally we show that, in any game, this class of agents is guaranteed to jointly learn to almost never play strategies that are eliminated by repeated elimination of purely dominated strategies.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗