Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Configurable Mirror Descent: Towards a Unification of Decision Making

Pengdeng Li · Shuxin Li · Chang Yang · Xinrun Wang · Shuyue Hu · Xiao Huang · Hau Chan · Bo An


Abstract:

Decision-making problems, categorized as single-agent, e.g., Atari, cooperative multi-agent, e.g., Hanabi, competitive multi-agent, e.g., Hold'em poker, and mixed cooperative and competitive, e.g., football, are ubiquitous in the real world. Various methods are proposed to address the specific decision-making problems. Despite the successes in specific categories, these methods typically evolve independently and cannot generalize to other categories. Therefore, a fundamental question for decision-making is: Can we develop a single algorithm to tackle ALL categories of decision-making problems? There are several main challenges to address this question: i) different decision-making categories involve different numbers of agents and different relationships between agents, ii) different categories have different solution concepts, as well as evaluation measures, and iii) there lacks a comprehensive benchmark covering all the decision-making categories. This work presents a preliminary attempt to address the question. Specifically, our contributions are three-fold. i) We propose the generalized mirror descent (GMD), a generalization of the widely-used MD variants, which takes multiple historical policies into account and works with any Bregman divergence. ii) We propose the configurable mirror descent (CMD) where a meta-controller is introduced to dynamically adjust the hyper-parameters in GMD conditional on the evaluation measures. iii) We construct the GameBench with 15 academic-friendly games across different decision-making categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CMD achieves empirically competitive or better outcomes compared to baselines while providing the capability of exploring diverse dimensions of decision making.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content