Expected flow networks in stochastic environments and two-player zero-sum games

Marco Jiralerspong, Bilun Sun, Danilo Vucetic, Tianyu Zhang, Yoshua Bengio, Gauthier Gidel, Nikolay Malkin

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Keywords: generative flow networks, GFlowNets, protein design, game theory, self-play, adversarial learning, stochastic environments, quantal response equilibrium, Luce agents, sequential decision making

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TL;DR: We generalize GFlowNets to stochastic and adversarial environments, achieving near-perfect play in simple two-player games.

Abstract:

Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are sequential sampling models trained to match a given distribution. GFlowNets have been successfully applied to various structured object generation tasks, sampling a diverse set of high-reward objects quickly. We propose expected flow networks (EFlowNets), which extend GFlowNets to stochastic environments. We show that EFlowNets outperform other GFlowNet formulations in stochastic tasks such as protein design. We then extend the concept of EFlowNets to adversarial environments, proposing adversarial flow networks (AFlowNets) for two-player zero-sum games. We show that AFlowNets learn to find above 80% of optimal moves in Connect-4 via self-play and outperform AlphaZero in tournaments.
Code: https://github.com/GFNOrg/AdversarialFlowNetworks.

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Primary Area: probabilistic methods (Bayesian methods, variational inference, sampling, UQ, etc.)

Submission Number: 406