Welfare Equilibria: A Solution to Arrogance and Catastrophe in Stackelberg Self-Play

Welfare Equilibria (WE) provide a generalization of Stackelberg strategies that can recover desirable Nash Equilibria in non-coincidental games, where the Stackelberg strategy profile fails. The Welfare Function Search (WelFuSe) algorithm adaptively chooses an appropriate welfare function to avoid catastrophe in self-play while preserving performance against naive learning opponents.