mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Limit-Computable Grains of Truth for Arbitrary Computable Extensive-Form (Un)Known Games

arXiv 2508.16245 ↗First posted 22 Aug 2025cs.GT cs.LG cs.MAcited by 2

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Abstract (arXiv)

A Bayesian player acting in an infinite multi-player game learns to predict the other players' strategies if his prior assigns positive probability to their play (or contains a grain of truth). Kalai and Lehrer's classic grain of truth problem is to find a reasonably large class of strategies that contains the Bayes-optimal policies with respect to this class, allowing mutually-consistent beliefs about strategy choice that obey the rules of Bayesian inference. Only small classes are known to have a grain of truth and the literature contains several related impossibility results. In this paper we present a formal and general solution to the full grain of truth problem: we construct a class of strategies wide enough to contain all computable strategies as well as Bayes-optimal strategies for every reasonable prior over the class. When the "environment" is a known repeated stage game, we show convergence in the sense of [KL93a] and [KL93b]. When the environment is unknown, agents using Thompson sampling converge to play varepsilon-Nash equilibria in arbitrary unknown computable multi-agent environments. Finally, we include an application to self-predictive policies that avoid planning. While these results use computability theory only as a conceptual tool to solve a classic game theory problem, we show that our solution can naturally be computationally approximated arbitrarily closely.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 4 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2025.

Builds on

4 of 26 references.

References · 4

  1. 2015Bad Universal Priors and Notions of Optimalitycited by 16
  2. 2016Thompson Sampling is Asymptotically Optimal in General Environmentscited by 8
  3. 2016A Formal Solution to the Grain of Truth Problemcited by 6
  4. 2015Reflective Oracles: A Foundation for Classical Game Theorycited by 4

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.