Off-Team Learning

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track

Bibtex Paper Supplemental

Authors

Brandon Cui, Hengyuan Hu, Andrei Lupu, Samuel Sokota, Jakob Foerster

Abstract

Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) evaluates an algorithm by the performance of a team of agents that were trained independently under that algorithm. Off-belief learning (OBL) is a recent method that achieves state-of-the-art results in ZSC in the game Hanabi. However, the implementation of OBL relies on a belief model that experiences covariate shift. Moreover, during ad-hoc coordination, OBL or any other neural policy may experience test-time covariate shift. We present two methods addressing these issues. The first method, off-team belief learning (OTBL), attempts to improve the accuracy of the belief model of a target policy πT on a broader range of inputs by weighting trajectories approximately according to the distribution induced by a different policy πb. The second, off-team off-belief learning (OT-OBL), attempts to compute an OBL equilibrium, where fixed point error is weighted according to the distribution induced by cross-play between the training policy π and a different fixed policy πb instead of self-play of π. We investigate these methods in variants of Hanabi.