On Reinforcement Learning for Full-length Game of StarCraft
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
arXiv:1809.09095 [cs.LG], (23 Sep 2018)
@article{pang2018reinforcement,
title={On Reinforcement Learning for Full-length Game of StarCraft},
author={Pang, Zhen-Jia and Liu, Ruo-Ze and Meng, Zhou-Yu and Zhang, Yi and Yu, Yang and Lu, Tong},
year={2018},
month={sep},
archivePrefix={"arXiv"},
primaryClass={cs.LG}
}
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 64×64 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.
October 6, 2018 by hgpu
