226 research outputs found
Multiagent Bidirectionally-Coordinated Nets: Emergence of Human-level Coordination in Learning to Play StarCraft Combat Games
Many artificial intelligence (AI) applications often require multiple
intelligent agents to work in a collaborative effort. Efficient learning for
intra-agent communication and coordination is an indispensable step towards
general AI. In this paper, we take StarCraft combat game as a case study, where
the task is to coordinate multiple agents as a team to defeat their enemies. To
maintain a scalable yet effective communication protocol, we introduce a
Multiagent Bidirectionally-Coordinated Network (BiCNet ['bIknet]) with a
vectorised extension of actor-critic formulation. We show that BiCNet can
handle different types of combats with arbitrary numbers of AI agents for both
sides. Our analysis demonstrates that without any supervisions such as human
demonstrations or labelled data, BiCNet could learn various types of advanced
coordination strategies that have been commonly used by experienced game
players. In our experiments, we evaluate our approach against multiple
baselines under different scenarios; it shows state-of-the-art performance, and
possesses potential values for large-scale real-world applications.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures. Previously as title: "Multiagent
Bidirectionally-Coordinated Nets for Learning to Play StarCraft Combat
Games", Mar 201
Macro action selection with deep reinforcement learning in StarCraft
StarCraft (SC) is one of the most popular and successful Real Time Strategy
(RTS) games. In recent years, SC is also widely accepted as a challenging
testbed for AI research because of its enormous state space, partially observed
information, multi-agent collaboration, and so on. With the help of annual
AIIDE and CIG competitions, a growing number of SC bots are proposed and
continuously improved. However, a large gap remains between the top-level bot
and the professional human player. One vital reason is that current SC bots
mainly rely on predefined rules to select macro actions during their games.
These rules are not scalable and efficient enough to cope with the enormous yet
partially observed state space in the game. In this paper, we propose a deep
reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to improve the selection of macro
actions. Our framework is based on the combination of the Ape-X DQN and the
Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM). We use this framework to build our bot, named as
LastOrder. Our evaluation, based on training against all bots from the AIIDE
2017 StarCraft AI competition set, shows that LastOrder achieves an 83% winning
rate, outperforming 26 bots in total 28 entrants
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Towards Informed Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning
In this thesis, we discuss various techniques for improving exploration for deep reinforcement learning. We begin with a brief review of reinforcement learning (RL) and the fundamental v.s. exploitation trade-off. Then we review how deep RL has improved upon classical and summarize six categories of the latest exploration methods for deep RL, in the order increasing usage of prior information. We then explore representative works in three categories discuss their strengths and weaknesses. The first category, represented by Soft Q-learning, uses regularization to encourage exploration. The second category, represented by count-based via hashing, maps states to hash codes for counting and assigns higher exploration to less-encountered states. The third category utilizes hierarchy and is represented by modular architecture for RL agents to play StarCraft II. Finally, we conclude that exploration by prior knowledge is a promising research direction and suggest topics of potentially impact
Counterfactual Multi-Agent Policy Gradients
Cooperative multi-agent systems can be naturally used to model many real
world problems, such as network packet routing and the coordination of
autonomous vehicles. There is a great need for new reinforcement learning
methods that can efficiently learn decentralised policies for such systems. To
this end, we propose a new multi-agent actor-critic method called
counterfactual multi-agent (COMA) policy gradients. COMA uses a centralised
critic to estimate the Q-function and decentralised actors to optimise the
agents' policies. In addition, to address the challenges of multi-agent credit
assignment, it uses a counterfactual baseline that marginalises out a single
agent's action, while keeping the other agents' actions fixed. COMA also uses a
critic representation that allows the counterfactual baseline to be computed
efficiently in a single forward pass. We evaluate COMA in the testbed of
StarCraft unit micromanagement, using a decentralised variant with significant
partial observability. COMA significantly improves average performance over
other multi-agent actor-critic methods in this setting, and the best performing
agents are competitive with state-of-the-art centralised controllers that get
access to the full state
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