Distributed Variable Sample-Size Gradient-response and Best-response Schemes for Stochastic Nash Equilibrium Problems over Graphs

Abstract: This paper considers a stochastic Nash game in which each player minimizes an expectation valued composite objective. We make the following contributions. (I) Under suitable monotonicity assumptions on the concatenated gradient map, we derive optimal rate statements and oracle complexity bounds for the proposed variable sample-size proximal stochastic gradient-response (VS-PGR) scheme when the sample-size increases at a geometric rate. If the sample-size increases at a polynomial rate of degree $v > 0$, the mean-squared errordecays at a corresponding polynomial rate while the iteration and oracle complexities to obtain an $\epsilon$-NE are $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^{1/v})$ and $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^{1+1/v})$, respectively. (II) We then overlay (VS-PGR) with a consensus phase with a view towards developing distributed protocols for aggregative stochastic Nash games. In the resulting scheme, when the sample-size and the consensus steps grow at a geometric and linear rate, computing an $\epsilon$-NE requires similar iteration and oracle complexities to (VS-PGR) with a communication complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\ln^2(1/\epsilon))$; (III) Under a suitable contractive property associated with the proximal best-response (BR) map, we design a variable sample-size proximal BR (VS-PBR) scheme, where each player solves a sample-average BR problem. Akin to (I), we also give the rate statements, oracle and iteration complexity bounds. (IV) Akin to (II), the distributed variant achieves similar iteration and oracle complexities to the centralized (VS-PBR) with a communication complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\ln^2(1/\epsilon))$ when the communication rounds per iteration increase at a linear rate. Finally, we present some preliminary numerics to provide empirical support for the rate and complexity statements.