发现强化学习在多人对抗中会因细节问题导致性能崩溃,提出简单干预恢复泛化能力。
Territory Paint Wars: Diagnosing and Mitigating Failure Modes in Competitive Multi-Agent PPO
- 通过控制实验识别出PPO在自对弈中的五个实现缺陷
- 纠正缺陷后发现竞争过拟合导致泛化能力从73.5%暴跌至21.6%
- 仅用20%随机对手即可避免过拟合,适合研究对抗式强化学习的团队
我们构建了名为Territory Paint Wars的轻量级竞争性多智能体强化学习环境(基于Unity),系统研究了在自对弈场景下近端策略优化(PPO)的失败模式。一个训练84,000轮的智能体在对称零和博弈中对阵均匀随机对手时,胜率仅26.8%。通过受控消融实验,我们识别出五类实现层面的失败原因:奖励尺度失衡、缺失终止信号、长时序信用分配失效、观测值未归一化以及胜利判定错误,这些均是该失败的关键因素。修正这些问题后,发现一种新出现的病理现象:竞争过拟合——双方智能体在自对弈中表现稳定,但泛化能力从73.5%骤降至21.6%。值得注意的是,这一失败无法通过标准自对弈指标察觉:双方同步适应,自对弈胜率始终维持在约50%。为此我们提出最小干预方案——对手混合:在20%训练回合中以固定均匀随机策略替代协同适应对手,成功将泛化能力恢复至77.1%(±12.6%,10组种子),且无需种群训练或额外基础设施。我们开源了Territory Paint Wars,为研究竞争性多智能体强化学习失败模式提供可复现基准。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We present Territory Paint Wars, a minimal competitive multi-agent reinforcement learning environment implemented in Unity, and use it to systematically investigate failure modes of Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) under self-play. A first agent trained for $84{,}000$ episodes achieves only $26.8\%$ win rate against a uniformly-random opponent in a symmetric zero-sum game. Through controlled ablations we identify five implementation-level failure modes -- reward-scale imbalance, missing terminal signal, ineffective long-horizon credit assignment, unnormalised observations, and incorrect win detection -- each of which contributes critically to this failure in this setting. After correcting these issues, we uncover a distinct emergent pathology: competitive overfitting, where co-adapting agents maintain stable self-play performance while generalisation win rate collapses from $73.5\%$ to $21.6\%$. Critically, this failure is undetectable via standard self-play metrics: both agents co-adapt equally, so the self-play win rate remains near $50\%$ throughout the collapse. We propose a minimal intervention -- opponent mixing, where $20\%$ of training episodes substitute a fixed uniformly-random policy for the co-adaptive opponent -- which mitigates competitive overfitting and restores generalisation to $77.1\%$ ($\pm 12.6\%$, $10$ seeds) without population-based training or additional infrastructure. We open-source Territory Paint Wars to provide a reproducible benchmark for studying competitive MARL failure modes.
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