The Update-Equivalence Framework for Decision-Time Planning

Published: 16 Jan 2024, Last Modified: 21 Apr 2024ICLR 2024 posterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics.
Keywords: imperfect-information games, search, decision-time planning
Submission Guidelines: I certify that this submission complies with the submission instructions as described on https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2024/AuthorGuide.
TL;DR: A framework for search in imperfect-information games based on update equivalences
Abstract: The process of revising (or constructing) a policy at execution time---known as decision-time planning---has been key to achieving superhuman performance in perfect-information games like chess and Go. A recent line of work has extended decision-time planning to imperfect-information games, leading to superhuman performance in poker. However, these methods involve solving subgames whose sizes grow quickly in the amount of non-public information, making them unhelpful when the amount of non-public information is large. Motivated by this issue, we introduce an alternative framework for decision-time planning that is not based on solving subgames, but rather on update equivalence. In this update-equivalence framework, decision-time planning algorithms replicate the updates of last-iterate algorithms, which need not rely on public information. This facilitates scalability to games with large amounts of non-public information. Using this framework, we derive a provably sound search algorithm for fully cooperative games based on mirror descent and a search algorithm for adversarial games based on magnetic mirror descent. We validate the performance of these algorithms in cooperative and adversarial domains, notably in Hanabi, the standard benchmark for search in fully cooperative imperfect-information games. Here, our mirror descent approach exceeds or matches the performance of public information-based search while using two orders of magnitude less search time. This is the first instance of a non-public-information-based algorithm outperforming public-information-based approaches in a domain they have historically dominated.
Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors' identity.
No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.
Primary Area: reinforcement learning
Submission Number: 4098
Loading