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Title: Latent forward model for Real-time Strategy game planning with incomplete information

Paper content:
Model-free deep reinforcement learning approaches have shown superhuman performance in simulated environments (e.g., Atari games, Go, etc).
During training, these approaches often implicitly construct a latent space that contains key information for decision making.
In this paper, we learn a forward model on this latent space and apply it to model-based planning in miniature Real-time Strategy game with incomplete information (MiniRTS).
We first show that the latent space constructed from existing actor-critic models contains relevant information of the game, and design training procedure to learn forward models.
We also show that our learned forward model can predict meaningful future state and is usable for latent space Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), in terms of win rates against rule-based agents.
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches (e.g., deep Q-learning BID14 ], DDPG BID12 ], A3C BID16 ], etc) have been applied extensively in many simulated environments with complete information and relatively simple game dynamics (e.g., Atari games, Go ], Doom, etc).
The learned agent, which acts reactively based on the current game situation, can even achieve superhuman performance.However, for complicated environments, planning ahead (or "predicting the future") before making an actual decision is important.
Such a planning procedure requires a forward model that estimates the next state s t+1 given the current state s t and action a t , which is in general non-trivial to construct and estimate from the high-dimensional raw input.
For partially observable environments (e.g., Real-time Strategy Games like StarCraft), constructing a forward model is more difficult even with a perfect domain knowledge of the game, due to the deliberate concealing of information and the additional requirement to capture the belief of the unknown for the agent.A natural question now arises.
Could we borrow the success of model-free approach to learn a forward model?
Note that in model-free approaches, a single shared network (called "trunk") is often used to extract features from the input game situation to obtain a latent representation.
From the latent space, multiple reinforcement learning quantities (Q-function, value function V , advantage function A, etc) are predicted via simple linear transformations and used for decision making.
Strong performance of these approaches indicates that the learned latent space must have captured key ingredients of the input situation and remains low-dimensional.
Therefore, it is an excellent candidate for the state representation of a forward model.In this paper, we study whether it is possible to use the latent space learned by model-free approaches to construct forward models.
We use MiniRTS ], an efficient and simple twoplayer Real-time Strategy (RTS) game.
MiniRTS captures the basic dynamics of its kind: the agent builds units (workers and troops) that consume resources, gathers resources, explores regions out of sights ("fog of war"), defends enemy's attack, and invades enemy's base.
This game is incomplete information, because the agent can only see within its sight, and does not know the action of its opponent by default.
Rather than unit based control as in ; ; ], the agent uses 9 discrete actions to control the overall strategy (e.g., build a particular kind of troops, attack or defend).Our
contributions are three-fold: First, we propose to study the relationship between the latent space learned by model-free approaches and the state representation of forward models. Very
few works (e.g, DARLA BID10 ], DQN BID15 ]) in model-free RL study these properties in depth, let alone using the latent state in model-based approaches for incomplete information game. To our
knowledge, we are one of the first works to explore such directions. Second
, we improve the performance of model-based agent in MiniRTS by input feature design and show that the latent space learned from actor-critic models BID16 ] can reconstruct critical information of the game, e.g., Hit Point of the base and available resources. Finally
, we propose novel algorithms that learn a forward model that maps a latent state h t to its future counterpart h t (t > t) with reduced drifting. Such a
forward model enables us to use model-based planning such as Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) in incomplete information games. We show
positive performance (8% higher than random planning) in terms of win rates against rule-based agents.
Latent space learned by model-free reinforcement learning encodes important information for an agent to make sensible decisions to maximize the reward in a complicated simulated environment.
In this paper, we verify the power of latent space of successfully trained model-free agent, and propose several methods to learn forward models on this space, in a real-time strategy game with incomplete information.
Despite an extremely hard problem, we learn forward models that make it possible to use planning approaches such as Monte Carlo Tree Search, and show consistently positive gains over baselines.A lot of future works follow.
As a first step, although we show that it is possible to learn a forward model for incomplete information Real-time Strategy games to enable model-based planning in the latent space, it remains an open problem how to improve its performance.
It is possible that despite a good forward model is learned, the value function is not good enough, e.g., putting too much focus on the on-policy trajectory, for Monte-Carlo Tree Search.
Also, in this paper we use predefined 9 global actions for the game.
How to automatically learn global actions from unit-based commands that are exponentially large, is still an challenging issue to solve.

assistant: text: The paper analyzes the latent space learned by model-free approaches in a miniature incomplete information game, trains a forward model in the latent space and apply it to Monte-Carlo Tree Search, yielding positive performance.