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Capture the Flag: the emergence of complex cooperative agents
- SmooL 8y agoThis is pretty huge. From the paper: The proposed training algorithm stabilises the learning process in partially observable multi-agent environments by concurrently training a diverse population of agents who learn by playing with each other, and in addition the agent population provides a mechanism for metaoptimisation. We solve the prohibitively hard credit assignment problem of learning from the sparse and delayed episodic team win/loss signal (optimising thousands of actions based on a single final reward) by enabling agents to evolve an internal reward signal that acts as a proxy for winning and provides denser rewards. Finally, we meet the memory and long-term temporal reasoning requirements of high-level, strategic CTF play by introducing an agent architecture that features a multi-timescale representation, reminiscent of what has been observed in primate cerebral cortex (11), and an external working memory module, broadly inspired by human episodic memory (22). These three innovations, integrated within a scalable, massively distributed, asynchronous computational framework, enables the training of highly skilled CTF agents through solely multi-agent interaction and single bits of feedback about game outcomes. Also important to note that agents learn only from raw pixel data and output to a virtual controller, and that even after artificially crimping the AI reaction time and shooting accuracy to human levels, they still performed far better than humans.