Geometric Convergence of Distributed Heavy-Ball Nash Equilibrium Algorithm over Time-Varying Digraphs with Unconstrained Actions

Abstract: This paper presents a new distributed algorithm that leverages heavy-ball momentum and a consensus-based gradient method to find a Nash equilibrium (NE) in a class of non-cooperative convex games with unconstrained action sets. In this approach, each agent in the game has access to its own smooth local cost function and can exchange information with its neighbors over a communication network. The main novelty of our work is the incorporation of heavy-ball momentum in the context of non-cooperative games that operate on fully-decentralized, directed, and time-varying communication graphs, while also accommodating non-identical step-sizes and momentum parameters. Overcoming technical challenges arising from the dynamic and asymmetric nature of mixing matrices and the presence of an additional momentum term, we provide a rigorous proof of the geometric convergence to the NE. Moreover, we establish explicit bounds for the step-size values and momentum parameters based on the characteristics of the cost functions, mixing matrices, and graph connectivity structures. We perform numerical simulations on a Nash-Cournot game to demonstrate accelerated convergence of the proposed algorithm compared to that of the existing methods.