{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T02:57:45Z","timestamp":1773802665558,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)","issue":"20","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["AAAI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) algorithms are a foundational class of methods for solving imperfect-information games, with the time average of their iterates converging to a Nash equilibrium in two-player zero-sum games. Prior state-of-the-art variants, Discounted CFR (DCFR) and Predictive CFR+ (PCFR+), achieved the fastest known practical performance by improving convergence rates over vanilla CFR through discounting early iterations with a fixed discounting scheme. More recently, Dynamic DCFR (DDCFR) introduced agent-learned dynamic discounting schemes to further accelerate convergence, at the cost of increased complexity. To address this, we propose Hyperparameter Schedules (HSs), a remarkably simple, training-free framework that dynamically adjusts CFR discounting over time. HSs aggressively downweight early updates and gradually transition to trusting late-stage strategies, leading to substantially faster convergence with only a few lines of code modifications. We show that HSs derived from just three small extensive-form games generalize effectively to 17 diverse games (including large-scale realistic poker) in both extensive-form and normal-form settings, without any game-specific tuning. Our method establishes a new state of the art for solving two-player zero-sum games.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v40i20.38784","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T00:48:52Z","timestamp":1773794932000},"page":"17319-17326","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Faster Game Solving via Hyperparameter Schedules"],"prefix":"10.1609","volume":"40","author":[{"given":"Naifeng","family":"Zhang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Stephen Marcus","family":"McAleer","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Tuomas","family":"Sandholm","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"9382","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"container-title":["Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/38784\/42746","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/38784\/42746","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T00:48:52Z","timestamp":1773794932000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/view\/38784"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"references-count":0,"journal-issue":{"issue":"20","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,17]]}},"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1609\/aaai.v40i20.38784","relation":{},"ISSN":["2374-3468","2159-5399"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2374-3468","type":"electronic"},{"value":"2159-5399","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]}}}