Decentralized Online Learning by Selfish Agents in Coalition Formation
Decentralized Online Learning by Selfish Agents in Coalition Formation
Saar Cohen, Noa Agmon
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3796-3804.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/422
Coalition formation involves self-organized coalitions generated through strategic interactions of autonomous selfish agents. In online learning of coalition structures, agents' preferences toward each other are initially unknown before agents interact. Coalitions are formed iteratively based on preferences that agents learn online from repeated feedback resulting from their interactions. In this paper, we introduce online learning in coalition formation through the lens of distributed decision-making, where self-interested agents operate without global coordination or information sharing, and learn only from their own experience. Under our selfish perspective, each agent seeks to maximize her own utility. Thus, we analyze the system in terms of Nash stability, where no agent can improve her utility by unilaterally deviating. We devise a sample-efficient decentralized algorithm for selfish agents that minimize their Nash regret, yielding approximately Nash stable solutions. In our algorithm, each agent uses only one utility feedback per round to update her strategy, but our algorithm still has Nash regret and sample complexity bounds that are optimal up to logarithmic factors.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Cooperative games
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Computational social choice
Machine Learning: ML: Online learning
Machine Learning: ML: Multi-armed bandits
