Title: Regret-Guided Search Control for Efficient Learning in AlphaZero
Primary area: reinforcement learning
Keywords: Search Control, Reinforcement Learning, Regret Prioritization, Monte Carlo Tree Search, AlphaZero

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) agents achieve remarkable performance but remain far less learning efficient than humans. While RL agents require extensive self-play games to extract useful signals, humans often need only a few games, improving rapidly by repeatedly revisiting states where mistakes occurred. This idea, known as search control, aims to restart from valuable states rather than always from the initial state. In AlphaZero, prior work Go-Exploit applies this idea by sampling past states from self-play or search trees, but it treats all states equally, regardless of their learning potential. We propose Regret-Guided Search Control (RGSC), which extends AlphaZero with a regret network that learns to identify high-regret states, where the agent's evaluation diverges most from the actual outcome. These states are collected from both self-play trajectories and MCTS nodes, stored in a prioritized regret buffer, and reused as new starting positions. Across 9×9 Go, 10×10 Othello, and 11×11 Hex, RGSC outperforms AlphaZero and Go-Exploit by an average of 77 and 89 Elo, respectively. When training on a well-trained 9×9 Go model, RGSC further improves the win rate against KataGo from 69.3% to 78.2%, while both baselines show no improvement. These results demonstrate that RGSC provides an effective mechanism for search control, improving both efficiency and robustness of AlphaZero training.

TL;DR: We propose regret-guided search control, extending AlphaZero with regret-guided restarts that yield more efficient and robust learning in board games.