No Arabic abstract
We introduce a new virtual environment for simulating a card game known as Big 2. This is a four-player game of imperfect information with a relatively complicated action space (being allowed to play 1,2,3,4 or 5 card combinations from an initial starting hand of 13 cards). As such it poses a challenge for many current reinforcement learning methods. We then use the recently proposed Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm to train a deep neural network to play the game, purely learning via self-play, and find that it is able to reach a level which outperforms amateur human players after only a relatively short amount of training time and without needing to search a tree of future game states.
Competitive Self-Play (CSP) based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has shown phenomenal breakthroughs recently. Strong AIs are achieved for several benchmarks, including Dota 2, Glory of Kings, Quake III, StarCraft II, to name a few. Despite the success, the MARL training is extremely data thirsty, requiring typically billions of (if not trillions of) frames be seen from the environment during training in order for learning a high performance agent. This poses non-trivial difficulties for researchers or engineers and prevents the application of MARL to a broader range of real-world problems. To address this issue, in this manuscript we describe a framework, referred to as TLeague, that aims at large-scale training and implements several main-stream CSP-MARL algorithms. The training can be deployed in either a single machine or a cluster of hybrid machines (CPUs and GPUs), where the standard Kubernetes is supported in a cloud native manner. TLeague achieves a high throughput and a reasonable scale-up when performing distributed training. Thanks to the modular design, it is also easy to extend for solving other multi-agent problems or implementing and verifying MARL algorithms. We present experiments over StarCraft II, ViZDoom and Pommerman to show the efficiency and effectiveness of TLeague. The code is open-sourced and available at https://github.com/tencent-ailab/tleague_projpage
Reproducibility in reinforcement learning is challenging: uncontrolled stochasticity from many sources, such as the learning algorithm, the learned policy, and the environment itself have led researchers to report the performance of learned agents using aggregate metrics of performance over multiple random seeds for a single environment. Unfortunately, there are still pernicious sources of variability in reinforcement learning agents that make reporting common summary statistics an unsound metric for performance. Our experiments demonstrate the variability of common agents used in the popular OpenAI Baselines repository. We make the case for reporting post-training agent performance as a distribution, rather than a point estimate.
Curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL) improves the learning speed and stability of an agent by exposing it to a tailored series of tasks throughout learning. Despite empirical successes, an open question in CRL is how to automatically generate a curriculum for a given reinforcement learning (RL) agent, avoiding manual design. In this paper, we propose an answer by interpreting the curriculum generation as an inference problem, where distributions over tasks are progressively learned to approach the target task. This approach leads to an automatic curriculum generation, whose pace is controlled by the agent, with solid theoretical motivation and easily integrated with deep RL algorithms. In the conducted experiments, the curricula generated with the proposed algorithm significantly improve learning performance across several environments and deep RL algorithms, matching or outperforming state-of-the-art existing CRL algorithms.
Using privileged information during training can improve the sample efficiency and performance of machine learning systems. This paradigm has been applied to reinforcement learning (RL), primarily in the form of distillation or auxiliary tasks, and less commonly in the form of augmenting the inputs of agents. In this work, we investigate Privileged Information Dropout (pid) for achieving the latter which can be applied equally to value-based and policy-based RL algorithms. Within a simple partially-observed environment, we demonstrate that pid outperforms alternatives for leveraging privileged information, including distillation and auxiliary tasks, and can successfully utilise different types of privileged information. Finally, we analyse its effect on the learned representations.
Reinforcement learning agents that operate in diverse and complex environments can benefit from the structured decomposition of their behavior. Often, this is addressed in the context of hierarchical reinforcement learning, where the aim is to decompose a policy into lower-level primitives or options, and a higher-level meta-policy that triggers the appropriate behaviors for a given situation. However, the meta-policy must still produce appropriate decisions in all states. In this work, we propose a policy design that decomposes into primitives, similarly to hierarchical reinforcement learning, but without a high-level meta-policy. Instead, each primitive can decide for themselves whether they wish to act in the current state. We use an information-theoretic mechanism for enabling this decentralized decision: each primitive chooses how much information it needs about the current state to make a decision and the primitive that requests the most information about the current state acts in the world. The primitives are regularized to use as little information as possible, which leads to natural competition and specialization. We experimentally demonstrate that this policy architecture improves over both flat and hierarchical policies in terms of generalization.