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Is Vanilla Policy Gradient Overlooked? Analyzing Deep Reinforcement Learning for Hanabi

Machine Learning 2022-03-23 v1 Artificial Intelligence Multiagent Systems

Abstract

In pursuit of enhanced multi-agent collaboration, we analyze several on-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms in the recently published Hanabi benchmark. Our research suggests a perhaps counter-intuitive finding, where Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is outperformed by Vanilla Policy Gradient over multiple random seeds in a simplified environment of the multi-agent cooperative card game. In our analysis of this behavior we look into Hanabi-specific metrics and hypothesize a reason for PPO's plateau. In addition, we provide proofs for the maximum length of a perfect game (71 turns) and any game (89 turns). Our code can be found at: https://github.com/bramgrooten/DeepRL-for-Hanabi

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.11656,
  title  = {Is Vanilla Policy Gradient Overlooked? Analyzing Deep Reinforcement Learning for Hanabi},
  author = {Bram Grooten and Jelle Wemmenhove and Maurice Poot and Jim Portegies},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.11656},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted at ALA 2022 (Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop at AAMAS 2022)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:21:52.326Z