24 accepted papers
Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning abilities are increasingly being applied to classical board and card games, but the dominant approach---involving prompting for direct move generation---has significant drawbacks. It relies on the model's implicit fragile pattern-matching capabilities, leading…
Opponent modeling methods typically involve two crucial steps: building a belief distribution over opponents' strategies, and exploiting this opponent model by playing a best response. However, existing approaches typically require domain-specific heurstics to come up with such a model, and algorith
Advancing planning and reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of the key prerequisites towards unlocking their potential for performing reliably in complex and impactful domains. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate this across board games (Chess, Fischer Random / Chess960, Co…
Evaluation has traditionally focused on ranking candidates for a specific skill. Modern generalist models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), decidedly outpace this paradigm. Open-ended evaluation systems, where candidate models are compared on user-submitted prompts, have emerged as a popular so…
The literature on game-theoretic equilibrium finding predominantly focuses on single games or their repeated play. Nevertheless, numerous real-world scenarios feature playing a game sampled from a distribution of similar, but not identical games, such as playing poker with different public cards or…
This work studies an algorithm, which we call magnetic mirror descent, that is inspired by mirror descent and the non-Euclidean proximal gradient algorithm. Our contribution is demonstrating the virtues of magnetic mirror descent as both an equilibrium solver and as an approach to reinforcement lear…
Recent techniques for approximating Nash equilibria in very large games leverage neural networks to learn approximately optimal policies (strategies). One promis- ing line of research uses neural networks to approximate counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) or its modern variants. DREAM, the only…
Researchers have shown that neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples and subtle environment changes. The resulting errors can look like blunders to humans, eroding trust in these agents. In prior games research, agent evaluation often focused on the in-practice game outcomes. Such eva…
Learning to play optimally against any mixture over a diverse set of strategies is of important practical interests in competitive games. In this paper, we propose simplex-NeuPL that satisfies two desiderata simultaneously: i) learning a population of strategically diverse basis policies, represente…
In this work, our goal is to train agents that can coordinate with seen, unseen as well as human partners in a multi-agent communication environment involving natural language. Previous work using a single set of agents has shown great progress in generalizing to known partners, however it struggles…
Hindsight rationality is an approach to playing general-sum games that prescribes no-regret learning dynamics for individual agents with respect to a set of deviations, and further describes jointly rational behavior among multiple agents with mediated equilibria. To develop hindsight rational learn…
In this paper we investigate the Follow the Regularized Leader dynamics in sequential imperfect information games (IIG). We generalize existing results of Poincar{é} recurrence from normal-form games to zero-sum two-player imperfect information games and other sequential game settings. We then inves…
Driven by recent successes in two-player, zero-sum game solving and playing, artificial intelligence work on games has increasingly focused on algorithms that produce equilibrium-based strategies. However, this approach has been less effective at producing competent players in general-sum games or t…
Two-player, constant-sum games are well studied in the literature, but there has been limited progress outside of this setting. We propose Joint Policy-Space Response Oracles (JPSRO), an algorithm for training agents in n-player, general-sum extensive form games, which provably converges to an equil…
For artificially intelligent learning systems to have widespread applicability in real-world settings, it is important that they be able to operate decentrally. Unfortunately, decentralized control is difficult---computing even an epsilon-optimal joint policy is a NEXP complete problem. Nevertheless…
This paper investigates a population-based training regime based on game-theoretic principles called Policy-Spaced Response Oracles (PSRO). PSRO is general in the sense that it (1) encompasses well-known algorithms such as fictitious play and double oracle as special cases, and (2) in principle appl…
We introduce and analyze a class of algorithms, called Mirror Ascent against an Improved Opponent (MAIO), for computing Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum games, both in normal form and in sequential form with imperfect information. These algorithms update the policy of each player with a mirror…
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have led to considerable progress in many 2-player zero-sum games, such as Go, Poker and Starcraft. The purely adversarial nature of such games allows for conceptually simple and principled application of RL methods. However real-world settings are…
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 o…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning offers a way to study how communication could emerge in communities of agents needing to solve specific problems. In this paper, we study the emergence of communication in the negotiation environment, a semi-cooperative model of agent interaction. We introduce two…
There has been a resurgence of interest in multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL), due partly to the recent success of deep neural networks. The simplest form of MARL is independent reinforcement learning (InRL), where each agent treats all of its experience as part of its (non stationary) environ…
In recent years there have been many successes of using deep representations in reinforcement learning. Still, many of these applications use conventional architectures, such as convolutional networks, LSTMs, or auto-encoders. In this paper, we present a new neural network architecture for model-fre…
We propose a novel approach to reduce memory consumption of the backpropagation through time (BPTT) algorithm when training recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Our approach uses dynamic programming to balance a trade-off between caching of intermediate results and recomputation. The algorithm is capab…
Fictitious play is a popular game-theoretic model of learning in games. However, it has received little attention in practical applications to large problems. This paper introduces two variants of fictitious play that are implemented in behavioural strategies of an extensive-form game. The first var…