University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Environmental curriculum learning for efficiently achieving superhuman play in games

Sun, Ray

Content Files
SUN-THESIS-2020.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/108014

Description

Title
Environmental curriculum learning for efficiently achieving superhuman play in games
Author(s)
Sun, Ray
Issue Date
2020-05-11
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Peng, Jian
Department of Study
Computer Science
Discipline
Computer Science
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.S.
Degree Level
Thesis
Date of Ingest
2020-08-26T21:55:00Z
Keyword(s)
  • reinforcement learning
  • curriculum learning
  • sample efficiency
  • StarCraft II
  • Pommerman
  • Monte Carlo tree search
Abstract
Reinforcement learning has made large strides in training agents to play games, including complex ones such as arcade game Pommerman and real-time strategy game StarCraft II. To allow agents to grasp the many concepts in these games, curriculum learning has been used to teach agents multiple skills over time. We present Environmental Curriculum Learning, a new technique for creating a curriculum of environment versions for an agent to learn in sequence. By adding helpful features to the state and action spaces, and then removing these helpers over the course of training, agents can focus on the fundamentals of a game one at a time. Our experiments in Pommerman illustrate the design principles of ECL, and our experiments in StarCraft II show that ECL produces agents with far better final performance than without it, when using the same training algorithm. Our StarCraft II ECL agent exceeds previous score records in a StarCraft II minigame, including human records, while taking far less training time to do so than previous approaches.
Graduation Semester
2020-05
Type of Resource
Thesis
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108014
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2020 Ray Sun

Owning Collections

Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois
Dissertations and Theses - Computer Science
Dissertations and Theses from the Siebel School of Computer Science