Related papers: AlphaZero-Inspired Game Learning: Faster Training …

In many problem settings, most notably in game playing, an agent receives a possibly delayed reward for its actions. Often, those rewards are handcrafted and not naturally given. Even simple terminal-only rewards, like winning equals 1 and…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods have achieved great success in many Artificial Intelligence (AI) benchmarks. The in-tree operations become a critical performance bottleneck in realizing parallel MCTS on CPUs. In this work, we develop…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), which leverages Upper Confidence Bound for Trees (UCTs) to balance exploration and exploitation through randomized sampling, is instrumental to solving complex planning problems. However, for multi-agent…

The AlphaZero algorithm for the learning of strategy games via self-play, which has produced superhuman ability in the games of Go, chess, and shogi, uses a quantitative reward function for game outcomes, requiring the users of the…

This paper proposes using a linear function approximator, rather than a deep neural network (DNN), to bias a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) player for general games. This is unlikely to match the potential raw playing strength of DNNs, but…

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms have accomplished remarkable breakthroughs in solving large-scale decision-making tasks. Nonetheless, most existing MARL algorithms are model-free, limiting sample efficiency and…

We present a self-improving, Neural Tree Expansion (NTE) method for multi-robot online planning in non-cooperative environments, where each robot attempts to maximize its cumulative reward while interacting with other self-interested…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has profoundly influenced reinforcement learning (RL) by integrating planning and learning in tasks requiring long-horizon reasoning, exemplified by the AlphaZero family of algorithms. Central to MCTS is the…

Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many applications. However, sample efficiency remains a key challenge, with prominent methods requiring millions (or even billions) of environment steps to train. Recently, there has been…

Designing protein nanomaterials of predefined shape and characteristics has the potential to dramatically impact the medical industry. Machine learning (ML) has proven successful in protein design, reducing the need for expensive wet lab…

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents achieve remarkable performance but remain far less learning-efficient than humans. While RL agents require extensive self-play games to extract useful signals, humans often need only a few games, improving…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a relatively new sampling method with multiple variants in the literature. They can be applied to a wide variety of challenging domains including board games, video games, and energy-based problems to…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for computationally expensive black-box optimization. However, traditional BO methods need to solve new problems from scratch, leading to slow convergence. Recent studies try to extend BO to a…

Autonomous agents have demonstrated significant potential in automating complex multistep decision-making tasks. However, even state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs), such as GPT-4o, still fall short of human-level performance,…

Traditional search algorithms have issues when applied to games of imperfect information where the number of possible underlying states and trajectories are very large. This challenge is particularly evident in trick-taking card games.…

This paper presents a novel approach to automated playtesting for the prediction of human player behavior and experience. It has previously been demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) game-playing agents can predict both game…

Strategy video games challenge AI agents with their combinatorial search space caused by complex game elements. State abstraction is a popular technique that reduces the state space complexity. However, current state abstraction methods for…

We propose Monte Carlo Permutation Search (MCPS), a general-purpose Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm that improves upon the GRAVE algorithm. MCPS is relevant when deep reinforcement learning is not an option or when the computing…

This article presents MCTS-BN, an adaptation of the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm for the structural learning of Bayesian Networks (BNs). Initially designed for game tree exploration, MCTS has been repurposed to address the…

Recent advances in reasoning with large language models (LLMs) have shown the effectiveness of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for generating high quality intermediate trajectories, particularly in math and symbolic domains. Inspired by…