Self-adaptive PSRO: Towards an Automatic Population-based Game Solver

Self-adaptive PSRO: Towards an Automatic Population-based Game Solver

Pengdeng Li, Shuxin Li, Chang Yang, Xinrun Wang, Xiao Huang, Hau Chan, Bo An

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 139-147. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/16

Policy-Space Response Oracles (PSRO) as a general algorithmic framework has achieved state-of-the-art performance in learning equilibrium policies of two-player zero-sum games. However, the hand-crafted hyperparameter value selection in most of the existing works requires extensive domain knowledge, forming the main barrier to applying PSRO to different games. In this work, we make the first attempt to investigate the possibility of self-adaptively determining the optimal hyperparameter values in the PSRO framework. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) Using several hyperparameters, we propose a parametric PSRO that unifies the gradient descent ascent (GDA) and different PSRO variants. (2) We propose the self-adaptive PSRO (SPSRO) by casting the hyperparameter value selection of the parametric PSRO as a hyperparameter optimization (HPO) problem where our objective is to learn an HPO policy that can self-adaptively determine the optimal hyperparameter values during the running of the parametric PSRO. (3) To overcome the poor performance of online HPO methods, we propose a novel offline HPO approach to optimize the HPO policy based on the Transformer architecture. Experiments on various two-player zero-sum games demonstrate the superiority of SPSRO over different baselines.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Multi-agent learning
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Noncooperative games
Machine Learning: ML: Game Theory
Machine Learning: ML: Hyperparameter optimization