Smooth markets: A basic mechanism for organizing gradient-based learners

Understand

With the success of modern machine learning, it is becoming increasingly important to understand and control how learning algorithms interact.

• Unfortunately, negative results from game theory show there is little hope of understanding or controlling general n-player games.
• We therefore introduce smooth markets (SM-games), a class of n-player games with pairwise zero sum interactions.
• SM-games codify a common design pattern in machine learning that includes (some) GANs, adversarial training, and other recent algorithms.