Average-and Last-Iterate Lower Bounds for Optimistic Matrix Mirror-Prox in Quantum Zero-Sum Games

arXiv:2609.38835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimistic matrix mirror-prox (OMMP) computes epsilon-approximate Nash equilibria in quantum zero-sum games with an O(1/arepsilon) average-iterate guarantee [arXiv:2311.10859]. We investigate whether this dependence on accuracy is tight and whether geometric last-iterate convergence can be guaranteed. We study these questions through explicit games with one qubit per player. First, we prove an Omega(1/arepsilon) lower bound for the uniform-average output that includes the maximally mixed initial state, independently of the regularizer and step size. Second, we construct a fixed game on which optimistic gradient descent-ascent (OGDA), initialized at the maximally mixed state, has last-iterate Frobenius distance to equilibrium Theta(1/t) and duality gap Theta(1/t^3) for every sufficiently small fixed step size. A separate fixed game exhibits arbitrarily long delays in reducing the initial error by a constant factor across a family of initial states. Finally, we give a fixed game with a unique, strictly complementary equilibrium on which optimistic matrix multiplicative weights updates (OMMWU) converge only polynomially from the maximally mixed state for every fixed positive step size. The last-iterate Frobenius distance and quantum relative entropy from the equilibrium to the iterates decay as Theta(1/t), while the duality gap decays as Theta(1/t^2).

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Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-10-01