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The literature on game-theoretic equilibrium finding predominantly focuses on single games or their repeated play. Nevertheless, numerous real-world scenarios feature playing a game sampled from a distribution of similar, but not identical games, such as playing poker with different public cards or trading correlated assets on the stock market. As these similar games feature similar equilibra, we investigate a way to accelerate equilibrium finding on such a distribution. We present a novel "learning not to regret" framework, enabling us to meta-learn a regret minimizer tailored to a specific distribution. Our key contribution, Neural Predictive Regret Matching, is uniquely meta-learned to converge rapidly for the chosen distribution of games, while having regret minimization guarantees on any game. We validated our algorithms' faster convergence on a distribution of river poker games. Our experiments show that the meta-learned algorithms outpace their non-meta-learned counterparts, achieving more than tenfold improvements.

Recent advancements in algorithms for sequential decision-making under imperfect information have shown remarkable success in large games such as limit- and no-limit poker. These algorithms traditionally formalize the games using the extensive-form game formalism, which, as we show, while theoretically sound, is memory-inefficient and computationally intensive in practice. To mitigate these challenges, a popular workaround involves using a specialized representation based on player specific information-state trees. However, as we show, this alternative significantly narrows the set of games that can be represented efficiently. In this study, we identify the set of large games on which modern algorithms have been benchmarked as being naturally represented by Sequential Bayesian Games. We elucidate the critical differences between extensive-form game and sequential Bayesian game representations, both theoretically and empirically. We further argue that the impressive experimental results often cited in the literature may be skewed, as they frequently stem from testing these algorithms only on this restricted class of games. By understanding these nuances, we aim to guide future research in developing more universally applicable and efficient algorithms for sequential decision-making under imperfect information.

Virtual clusters are widely used computing platforms than can be deployed in multiple cloud platforms. The ability to dynamically grow and shrink the number of nodes has paved the way for customised elastic computing both for High Performance Computing and High Throughput Computing workloads. However, elasticity is typically restricted to a single cloud site, thus hindering the ability to provision computational resources from multiple geographically distributed cloud sites. To this aim, this paper introduces an architecture of open-source components that coherently deploy a virtual elastic cluster across multiple cloud sites to perform large-scale computing. These hybrid virtual elastic clusters are automatically deployed and configured using an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach on a distributed hybrid testbed that spans different organizations, including on-premises and public clouds, supporting automated tunneling of communications across the cluster nodes with advanced VPN topologies. The results indicate that cluster-based computing of embarrassingly parallel jobs can benefit from hybrid virtual clusters that aggregate computing resources from multiple cloud back-ends and bring them together into a dedicated, albeit virtual network. The work presented in this article has been partially funded by the European Union's (EU) Horizon 2020 research project DEEP Hybrid-DataCloud (grant agreement No 777435)., Comment: 33 pages, 11 figures

Search has played a fundamental role in computer game research since the very beginning. And while online search has been commonly used in perfect information games such as Chess and Go, online search methods for imperfect information games have only been introduced relatively recently. This paper addresses the question of what is a sound online algorithm in an imperfect information setting of two-player zero-sum games. We argue that the~fixed-strategy~definitions of exploitability and $\epsilon$-Nash equilibria are ill-suited to measure an online algorithm's worst-case performance. We thus formalize $\epsilon$-soundness, a concept that connects the worst-case performance of an online algorithm to the performance of an $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium. As $\epsilon$-soundness can be difficult to compute in general, we introduce a consistency framework -- a hierarchy that connects an online algorithm's behavior to a Nash equilibrium. These multiple levels of consistency describe in what sense an online algorithm plays "just like a fixed Nash equilibrium". These notions further illustrate the difference between perfect and imperfect information settings, as the same consistency guarantees have different worst-case online performance in perfect and imperfect information games. The definitions of soundness and the consistency hierarchy finally provide appropriate tools to analyze online algorithms in repeated imperfect information games. We thus inspect some of the previous online algorithms in a new light, bringing new insights into their worst-case performance guarantees., Comment: Accepted to AAMAS2021 as extended abstract (Ref. numbers not available yet)

Online game playing algorithms produce high-quality strategies with a fraction of memory and computation required by their offline alternatives. Continual Resolving (CR) is a recent theoretically sound approach to online game playing that has been used to outperform human professionals in poker. However, parts of the algorithm were specific to poker, which enjoys many properties not shared by other imperfect information games. We present a domain-independent formulation of CR applicable to any two-player zero-sum extensive-form games that works with an abstract resolving algorithm. We further describe and implement its Monte Carlo variant (MCCR) which uses Monte Carlo Counterfactual Regret Minimization (MCCFR) as a resolver. We prove the correctness of CR and show an $O(T^{-1/2})$-dependence of MCCR's exploitability on the computation time. Furthermore, we present an empirical comparison of MCCR with incremental tree building to Online Outcome Sampling and Information-set MCTS on several domains.

We present a dockerized version of a real-time strategy game StarCraft: Brood War, commonly used as a domain for AI research, with a pre-installed collection of AI developement tools supporting all the major types of StarCraft bots. This provides a convenient way to deploy StarCraft AIs on numerous hosts at once and across multiple platforms despite limited OS support of StarCraft. In this technical report, we describe the design of our Docker images and present a few use cases.

This paper describes the achievements of the H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud. The project has provided e-infrastructures with tools, applications and cloud framework enhancements to manage the demanding requirements of scientific communities, either locally or through enhanced interfaces. The middleware developed allows to federate hybrid resources, to easily write, port and run scientific applications to the cloud. In particular, we have extended existing PaaS (Platform as a Service) solutions, allowing public and private e-infrastructures, including those provided by EGI, EUDAT, and Helix Nebula, to integrate their existing services and make them available through AAI services compliant with GEANT interfederation policies, thus guaranteeing transparency and trust in the provisioning of such services. Our middleware facilitates the execution of applications using containers on Cloud and Grid based infrastructures, as well as on HPC clusters. Our developments are freely downloadable as open source components, and are already being integrated into many scientific applications., Comment: 39 pages, 15 figures.Version accepted in Journal of Grid Computing