Actor-Critic Policy Optimization in Partially Observable Multiagent Environments

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (NeurIPS 2018)

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Authors

Sriram Srinivasan, Marc Lanctot, Vinicius Zambaldi, Julien Perolat, Karl Tuyls, Remi Munos, Michael Bowling

Abstract

Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence. Among the most common approaches are algorithms based on gradient ascent of a score function representing discounted return. In this paper, we examine the role of these policy gradient and actor-critic algorithms in partially-observable multiagent environments. We show several candidate policy update rules and relate them to a foundation of regret minimization and multiagent learning techniques for the one-shot and tabular cases, leading to previously unknown convergence guarantees. We apply our method to model-free multiagent reinforcement learning in adversarial sequential decision problems (zero-sum imperfect information games), using RL-style function approximation. We evaluate on commonly used benchmark Poker domains, showing performance against fixed policies and empirical convergence to approximate Nash equilibria in self-play with rates similar to or better than a baseline model-free algorithm for zero-sum games, without any domain-specific state space reductions.