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On Reinforcement Learning for Full-Length Game of StarCraft (arxiv.org)
1 point by federicoponzi on Sep 26, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It plays using longer expert-style commands learned from recorded matches instead of every tiny move, with two training layers that ramp from easy to hard. It beats the toughest fair built-in opponent over 93% of the time, training in two days on one machine.

Abstract · On Reinforcement Learning for Full-length Game of StarCraft

StarCraft II poses a grand challenge for reinforcement learning. The main difficulties of it include huge state and action space and a long-time horizon. In this paper, we investigate a hierarchical reinforcement learning approach for StarCraft II. The hierarchy involves two levels of abstraction. One is the macro-action automatically extracted from expert's trajectories, which reduces the action space in an order of magnitude yet remains effective. The other is a two-layer hierarchical architecture which is modular and easy to scale, enabling a curriculum transferring from simpler tasks to more complex tasks. The reinforcement training algorithm for this architecture is also investigated. On a 64x64 map and using restrictive units, we achieve a winning rate of more than 99\% against the difficulty level-1 built-in AI. Through the curriculum transfer learning algorithm and a mixture of combat model, we can achieve over 93\% winning rate of Protoss against the most difficult non-cheating built-in AI (level-7) of Terran, training within two days using a single machine with only 48 CPU cores and 8 K40 GPUs. It also shows strong generalization performance, when tested against never seen opponents including cheating levels built-in AI and all levels of Zerg and Protoss built-in AI. We hope this study could shed some light on the future research of large-scale reinforcement learning.

Zhen-Jia Pang, Ruo-Ze Liu, Zhou-Yu Meng, Yi Zhang, Yang Yu, Tong Lu
arXiv:1809.09095 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Sep 23, 2018 · updated Feb 3, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Appeared in AAAI 2019

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