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Title: Double Neural Counterfactual Regret Minimization

Paper content:
Counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) is a fundamental and effective technique for solving Imperfect Information Games (IIG).
However, the original CFR algorithm only works for discrete states and action spaces, and the resulting strategy is maintained as a tabular representation.
Such tabular representation limits the method from being directly applied to large games.
In this paper, we propose a double neural representation for the IIGs, where one neural network represents the cumulative regret, and the other represents the average strategy.
Such neural representations allow us to avoid manual game abstraction and carry out end-to-end optimization.
To make the learning efficient, we also developed several novel techniques including a robust sampling method and a mini-batch Monte Carlo Counterfactual Regret Minimization (MCCFR) method, which may be of independent interests.
Empirically, on games tractable to tabular approaches, neural strategies trained with our algorithm converge comparably to their tabular counterparts, and significantly outperform those based on deep reinforcement learning.
On extremely large games with billions of decision nodes, our approach achieved strong performance while using hundreds of times less memory than the tabular CFR.
On head-to-head matches of hands-up no-limit texas hold'em, our neural agent beat the strong agent ABS-CFR by $9.8\pm4.1$ chips per game.
It's a successful application of neural CFR in large games.
While significant advance has been made in addressing large perfect information games, such as Go (Silver et al., 2016) , solving imperfect information games remains a challenging task.
For Imperfect Information Games (IIG), a player has only partial knowledge about her opponents before making a decision, so that she has to reason under the uncertainty about her opponents' information while exploiting the opponents' uncertainty about herself.
Thus, IIGs provide more realistic modeling than perfect information games for many real-world applications, such as trading, traffic routing, and politics.
Nash equilibrium is a typical solution concept for a two-player perfect-recall IIG.
One of the most effective approaches is CFR (Zinkevich et al., 2007) , which minimizes the overall counterfactual regret so that the average strategies converge to a Nash equilibrium.
However the original CFR only works for discrete states and action spaces, and the resulting strategy is maintained as a tabular representation.
Such tabular representation limits the method from being directly applied to large games.
To tackle this challenge, one can simplify the game by grouping similar states together to solve the simplified (abstracted) game approximately via tabular CFR (Zinkevich et al., 2007; Lanctot et al., 2009) .
Constructing an effective abstraction, however, demands rich domain knowledge and its solution may be a coarse approximation of true equilibrium.
Function approximation can be used to replace the tabular representation.
Waugh et al. (2015) combines regression tree function approximation with CFR based on handcrafted features, which is called Regression CFR (RCFR).
However, since RCFR uses full traversals of the game tree, it is still impractical for large games.
Moravcik et al. (2017) propose a seminal approach DeepStack, which uses fully connected neural networks to represent players' counterfactual values, tabular CFR however was used in the subgame solving.
Jin et al. (2017) use deep reinforcement learning to solve regret minimization problem for single-agent settings, which is different from two-player perfect-recall IIGs.
To learn approximate Nash equilibrium for IIGs in an end-to-end manner, Heinrich et al. (2015) and Heinrich & Silver (2016) propose eXtensive-form Fictitious Play (XFP) and Neural Fictitious Self-Play (NFSP), respectively, based on deep reinforcement learning.
In a NFSP model, the neural strategies are updated by selecting the best responses to their opponents' average strategies.
These approaches are advantageous in the sense that they do not rely on abstracting the game, and accordingly their strategies can improve continuously with more optimization iterations.
However fictitious play empirically converges much slower than CFR-based approaches.
Srinivasan et al. (2018) use actor-critic policy optimization methods to minimize regret and achieve performance comparable to NFSP.
Thus it remains an open question whether a purely neural-based end-to-end approach can achieve comparable performance to tabular based CFR approach.
In the paper, we solve this open question by designing a double neural counterfactual regret minimization (DNCFR) algorithm 2 .
To make a neural representation, we modeled imperfect information game by a novel recurrent neural network with attention.
Furthermore, in order to improve the convergence of the neural algorithm, we also developed a new sampling technique which converged much more efficient than the outcome sampling, while being more memory efficient than the external sampling.
In the experiment, we conducted a set of ablation studies related to each novelty.
The experiments showed DNCRF converged to comparable results produced by its tabular counterpart while performing much better than NFSP.
In addition, we tested DNCFR on extremely large game, heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'em (HUNL).
The experiments showed that DNCFR with only a few number of parameters achieved strong neural strategy and beat ABS-CFR.
h∈H denotes a possible history (or state), which consists of each player's hidden variable and actions taken by all players including chance.
The empty sequence ∅ is a member of H. h j h denotes h j is a prefix of
h. Z ⊆ H denotes the terminal histories and any member z ∈Z is not a prefix of any other sequences.
A(h)={a:ha∈H} is the set of available actions after non-terminal history h ∈ H \Z.
A player function P assigns a member of N ∪{c} to each non-terminal history, where c is the chance ( we set c=−1).
P (h) is the player who takes an action after history
h. For each player i, imperfect information is denoted by information set (infoset) I i .
All states h∈I i are indistinguishable to
i. I i refers to the set of infosets of
i. The utility function u i (z) defines the payoff of i at state z.
See appendix B.1 for more details.
Solving IIGs via function approximation methods is an important and challenging problem.
Neural Fictitious Self-Play (NFSP) (Heinrich & Silver, 2016 ) is a function approximation method based on deep reinforcement learning, which is a prior leading method to solve IIG.
However, fictitious play empirically converges slower than CFR-based approaches in many settings.
Recently, Lockhart et al. (2019) propose a new framework to directly optimize the final policy against worst-case opponents.
However, the authors consider only small games.
Regression CFR (RCFR) (Waugh et al., 2015) is a function approximation method based on CFR.
However, RCFR needs to traverse the full game tree.
Such traversal is intractable in large games.
In addition, RCFR uses hand-crafted features and regression tree to estimate cumulative regret rather than learning features from data.
Deep learning empirically performs better than regression tree in many areas, such as the Transformer and BERT in natural language models (Ashish Vaswani, 2017; Jacob Devlin, 2018) .
In the past year, concurrent works deep CFR (DCFR) (Brown et al., 2018) and single deep CFR (SD-CFR) (Steinberger, 2019) have been proposed to address this problem via deep learning.
DCFR, SDCFR, RCFR and our DNCFR are based on the framework of counterfactual regret minimization.
However, there are many differences in several important aspects, which are listed as follows.
(1) We represent the extensive-form game by recurrent neural network.
The proposed LSTM with attention performs better than fully connected network (see details in Section 3.2).
(2) DNCFR updates the cumulative regret only based on the additionally collected samples in current iteration rather than using the samples in a big reservoir (see details in Section 3.3.1).
(3) It's important to use squared-loss for the average strategies rather than log loss.
Because the log loss is based on the big reservoir samples up to T -th iteration, it is very memory-expensive (see details in Section 3.3.2).
(4) Another important aspect to make deep learning model work is that we divide regret by √ T and renormalize the regret, because the cumulative regret can grow unboundedly (see details in Section 3.3.1).
(5) Also, DNCFR collects data by an efficiently unbiased mini-batch robust sampling method, which may be of independent interests to the IIG communities (see details in Section 4).
There are also big differences in the experimental evaluations.
In our method, we conduct a set of ablation studies in various settings.
We believe that our ablation studies are informative and could have a significant impact on these kinds of algorithms.
Also, we evaluate DNCFR on extremely large games while RCFR and SDCFR are only evaluated on small toy games.
We proposed a novel double neural counterfactual regret minimization approach to solve large IIGs by combining many novel techniques, such as recurrent neural representation, attention, robust sampling, and mini-batch MCCFR.
We conduct a set of ablation studies and the results show that these techniques may be of independent interests.
This is a successful application of applying deep learning into large IIG.
We believe DNCFR and other related neural methods open up a promising direction for future work.
A GAME RULES

assistant: text: We proposed a double neural framework to solve large-scale imperfect information game.