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Superstition in the Network: Deep Reinforcement Learning Plays Deceptive Games (arxiv.org)
4 points by headalgorithm on Oct 8, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A game player that learns by trial and error was tested on four games built to fool it, alongside a planner that searches ahead. Several reliably tricked it, and its mistakes differed from the planner's, hinting at a map of how learners get fooled.

Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning has learned to play many games well, but failed on others. To better characterize the modes and reasons of failure of deep reinforcement learners, we test the widely used Asynchronous Actor-Critic (A2C) algorithm on four deceptive games, which are specially designed to provide challenges to game-playing agents. These games are implemented in the General Video Game AI framework, which allows us to compare the behavior of reinforcement learning-based agents with planning agents based on tree search. We find that several of these games reliably deceive deep reinforcement learners, and that the resulting behavior highlights the shortcomings of the learning algorithm. The particular ways in which agents fail differ from how planning-based agents fail, further illuminating the character of these algorithms. We propose an initial typology of deceptions which could help us better understand pitfalls and failure modes of (deep) reinforcement learning.

Philip Bontrager, Ahmed Khalifa, Damien Anderson, Matthew Stephenson, Christoph Salge, Julian Togelius
arXiv:1908.04436 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Aug 12, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 7 pages, 4 figures, Accepted at the 15th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 19)

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Also discussed: Aug 2019 (3 points, 0 comments)