arXiv AI By Brent Kong, Tejas Ram, Tony Yue Yu

AlphaZero in Sparsely Rewarded Games: Limits and Auxiliary Supervision

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arXiv:2607. 08984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AlphaZero has demonstrated that a neural-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search can achieve superhuman performance, but strong play does not necessarily imply perfect play.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Shared Actors Need Not Share Critics: Effects of Value Mismatch in Parallel Reinforcement Learning

The paper investigates the problem of sharing a single critic across multiple parallel environments in reinforcement learning. It shows that when environments assign different expected returns to the same state, a shared critic must reconcile conflicting value targets, which can distort advantage estimates and misguide policy updates. The authors propose a simple fix—providing the critic with the environment index—demonstrating through bandit models and experiments on CartPole, MuJoCo, BipedalWalker, and 16 Procgen games that this conditional critic stabilizes learning and boosts returns, achieving a 40.8% improvement in aggregate normalized return on unseen levels.

By Zhenya Liu, Yang Meng, Zhuokai Zhao, Xuefeng Liu, Yuxin Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 18

UC-PSRO: Utility-Conditioned Policy-Space Response Oracles with a Communication-Dropout Curriculum for Game-Theoretic Course-of-Action Generation in Adversarial Swarms

arXiv:2608. 15372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study generating game-theoretically optimized Courses of Action (COAs) for a Blue UAS swarm against an adaptive Red adversary in a communication-degraded environment, motivated by (but not derived from) a public U.

By Phillip Jiang