Sample-Efficient Policy Space Response Oracles with Joint Experience Best Response
#MARL #PSRO #Best Response #arXiv #Reinforcement Learning #Multi-agent systems #Sample efficiency
📌 Key Takeaways
- Researchers introduced Joint Experience Best Response to optimize multi-agent reinforcement learning.
- The method addresses the 'prohibitively expensive' costs of training individual best responses in PSRO.
- The framework improves sample efficiency, allowing for more scalable game-theoretic analysis.
- This advancement helps AI capture complex non-transitive interactions in environments with many participants.
📖 Full Retelling
Researchers specializing in artificial intelligence published a technical paper on the arXiv preprint server on February 11, 2024, introducing a new method called Joint Experience Best Response to improve the efficiency of Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) in strategic gaming environments. The team developed this approach to address the high computational costs and non-stationarity issues traditionally associated with Policy Space Response Oracles (PSRO), which are used to analyze complex interactions in multi-player scenarios. By optimizing how agents learn from shared experiences, the researchers aim to make game-theoretic analysis more accessible for systems involving many agents.
The core of the innovation lies in overcoming the limitations of Policy Space Response Oracles, which typically require individual, per-agent Best Response (BR) training. In many-agent environments, this standard iterative process becomes prohibitively expensive because each agent must separately calculate its optimal strategy against the current population. This often leads to a bottleneck where the diversity of strategies needed to capture non-transitive interactions—essentially 'rock-paper-scissors' dynamics—cannot be maintained due to the sheer volume of processing power required.
The newly proposed Joint Experience Best Response framework significantly reduces the sample complexity required to expand the game's strategy space. By streamlining how data is utilized across the population, the algorithm allows for more frequent and efficient updates to the restricted game. This ensures that the resulting MARL models remain scalable while accurately reflecting the evolving strategies of competitors. The researchers successfully demonstrated that their method maintains a balance between strategic diversity and computational thrift, making it a viable alternative for simulating complex multi-agent systems.
Ultimately, this breakthrough has broader implications for areas beyond simple gaming, including robotics, autonomous driving, and economic modeling. As AI agents move from controlled tests to real-world environments where they must interact with multiple entities simultaneously, the ability to rapidly calculate best responses without massive hardware overhead is crucial. This paper contributes a foundational step toward more robust and computationally sustainable multi-agent intelligence.
🏷️ Themes
Artificial Intelligence, Game Theory, Machine Learning
📚 Related People & Topics
Reinforcement learning
Field of machine learning
In machine learning and optimal control, reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with how an intelligent agent should take actions in a dynamic environment in order to maximize a reward signal. Reinforcement learning is one of the three basic machine learning paradigms, alongside supervised learnin...
🔗 Entity Intersection Graph
Connections for Reinforcement learning:
- 🌐 Large language model (10 shared articles)
- 🌐 Reasoning model (3 shared articles)
- 🌐 Natural language processing (2 shared articles)
- 🌐 Neural network (2 shared articles)
- 🌐 PPO (2 shared articles)
- 🌐 Autonomous system (2 shared articles)
- 👤 Do It (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Markov decision process (1 shared articles)
- 👤 Knowledge Graph (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Linear temporal logic (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Automaton (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Artificial intelligence (1 shared articles)
📄 Original Source Content
arXiv:2602.06599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) offers a scalable alternative to exact game-theoretic analysis but suffers from non-stationarity and the need to maintain diverse populations of strategies that capture non-transitive interactions. Policy Space Response Oracles (PSRO) address these issues by iteratively expanding a restricted game with approximate best responses (BRs), yet per-agent BR training makes it prohibitively expensive in many-ag