At a finite public-chance cut, counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) must choose how many outcomes to evaluate before each regret update. Exact evaluation processes the full cut at one strategy profile; persistent partial evaluation processes a fixed without-replacement order across evolving profiles. The latter covers every outcome once per epoch, yet its feedback is generally conditionally biased because earlier batches influence the profiles seen by later batches. We establish a deterministic target-transfer theorem for uniform, nonnested additive public cuts. The theorem bounds full-cut exploitability by regret on the delivered feedback and a public-debit term that couples prefix coverage discrepancy with motion along the realized strategy path. Consecutively balanced schedules consequently converge for additive signed regret matching (RM) and RM+ under predetermined averaging weights, while a fixed RM+ construction proves that the discrepancy--path product is necessary in general. A component-resolved form of the theorem converts an execution trace into a numerical exploitability certificate. On two released heads-up no-limit hold'em turn endgames, persistent order improves substantially over fresh reshuffling despite identical epochwise coverage, and partial coverage wins every registered shallow matched-budget comparison. A depth study locates a crossover between 32 and 64 full-cut outcome budgets, after which complete coverage dominates. These results characterize public-chance width and order as learning variables and provide a deterministic basis for designing and auditing persistent CFR schedules.
Conor M. Artman, Nicholas Di, Scott Perkinscs.LG cs.MA
While many algorithms blend reinforcement learning (RL) with counterfactual regret (CFR) methods to leverage tradeoffs in computational speed and performance, there are fewer investigations into generative sampling frameworks in game theoretic applications in incomplete information games. We extend a generative flow network framework, Adversarial Flow Networks (AFlowNets), to incomplete information games, called Information Flow Networks (IFNs). We prove that previously established constraints for generative flow networks in complete information games are inadmissible for obtaining valid densities (corresponding to player strategies) and a valid training objective. We show that our proposed generalization, IFlowNets, alleviates this issue and strictly generalizes AFlowNets. In preliminary results for three standard game environments, IFlowNets perform comparably to or better than Outcome Sampling Monte Carlo Counterfactual Regret (OSMCCFR) and standard RL-based methods in performance and speed.