English

Discovering Diverse Multi-Agent Strategic Behavior via Reward Randomization

Artificial Intelligence 2021-03-15 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

We propose a simple, general and effective technique, Reward Randomization for discovering diverse strategic policies in complex multi-agent games. Combining reward randomization and policy gradient, we derive a new algorithm, Reward-Randomized Policy Gradient (RPG). RPG is able to discover multiple distinctive human-interpretable strategies in challenging temporal trust dilemmas, including grid-world games and a real-world game Agar.io, where multiple equilibria exist but standard multi-agent policy gradient algorithms always converge to a fixed one with a sub-optimal payoff for every player even using state-of-the-art exploration techniques. Furthermore, with the set of diverse strategies from RPG, we can (1) achieve higher payoffs by fine-tuning the best policy from the set; and (2) obtain an adaptive agent by using this set of strategies as its training opponents. The source code and example videos can be found in our website: https://sites.google.com/view/staghuntrpg.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.04564,
  title  = {Discovering Diverse Multi-Agent Strategic Behavior via Reward Randomization},
  author = {Zhenggang Tang and Chao Yu and Boyuan Chen and Huazhe Xu and Xiaolong Wang and Fei Fang and Simon Du and Yu Wang and Yi Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.04564},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted paper on ICLR 2021. First two authors share equal contribution

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:51:49.561Z