On the exact convergence to Nash equilibrium in hypomonotone regimes under full and partial-information

Dian Gadjov, Lacra Pavel

Published 2021-04-22Version 1

In this paper, we consider distributed Nash equilibrium seeking in monotone and hypomonotone games. We first assume that each player has knowledge of the opponents' decisions and propose a passivity-based modification of the standard gradient-play dynamics, that we call "Heavy Anchor". We prove that Heavy Anchor allows a relaxation of strict monotonicity of the pseudo-gradient, needed for gradient-play dynamics, and can ensure exact asymptotic convergence in merely monotone regimes. We extend these results to the setting where each player has only partial information of the opponents' decisions. Each player maintains a local decision variable and an auxiliary state estimate and communicates with their neighbours to learn the opponents' actions. We modify Heavy Anchor via a distributed Laplacian feedback and show how we can exploit equilibrium-independent passivity properties to achieve convergence to a Nash equilibrium in hypomonotone regimes.