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Poster
K-level Reasoning for Zero-Shot Coordination in Hanabi
Brandon Cui · Hengyuan Hu · Luis Pineda · Jakob Foerster

Tue Dec 07 04:30 PM -- 06:00 PM (PST) @ None #None
The standard problem setting in cooperative multi-agent settings is \emph{self-play} (SP), where the goal is to train a \emph{team} of agents that works well together.     However, optimal SP policies commonly contain arbitrary conventions  (handshakes'') and are not compatible with other, independently trained agents or humans.     This latter desiderata was recently formalized by \cite{Hu2020-OtherPlay} as the \emph{zero-shot coordination} (ZSC) setting and partially addressed with their \emph{Other-Play} (OP) algorithm, which showed improved ZSC and human-AI performance in the card game Hanabi.     OP assumes access to the symmetries of the environment and prevents agents from breaking these in a mutually \emph{incompatible} way during training. However, as the authors point out, discovering symmetries for a given environment is a computationally hard problem.    Instead, we show that through a simple adaption of k-level reasoning (KLR) \cite{Costa-Gomes2006-K-level}, synchronously training all levels, we can obtain competitive ZSC and ad-hoc teamplay performance in Hanabi, including when paired with a human-like proxy bot. We also introduce a new method, synchronous-k-level reasoning with a best response (SyKLRBR), which further improves performance on our synchronous KLR by co-training a best response.
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#### Author Information

##### Jakob Foerster (University of Oxford)

Jakob Foerster received a CIFAR AI chair in 2019 and is starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute in the academic year 20/21. During his PhD at the University of Oxford, he helped bring deep multi-agent reinforcement learning to the forefront of AI research and interned at Google Brain, OpenAI, and DeepMind. He has since been working as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research in California, where he will continue advancing the field up to his move to Toronto. He was the lead organizer of the first Emergent Communication (EmeCom) workshop at NeurIPS in 2017, which he has helped organize ever since.