John Schultz

John Schultz, Jakub Adamek, Matej Jusup et al. · deepmind

Advancing planning and reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of the key prerequisites towards unlocking their potential for performing reliably in complex and impactful domains. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate this across board games (Chess, Fischer Random / Chess960, Connect Four, and Hex), and we show that search-based planning can yield significant improvements in LLM game-playing strength. We introduce, compare and contrast two major approaches: In external search, the model guides Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) rollouts and evaluations without calls to an external game engine, and in internal search, the model is trained to generate in-context a linearized tree of search and a resulting final choice. Both build on a language model pre-trained on relevant domain knowledge, reliably capturing the transition and value functions in the respective environments, with minimal hallucinations. We evaluate our LLM search implementations against game-specific state-of-the-art engines, showcasing substantial improvements in strength over the base model, and reaching Grandmaster-level performance in chess while operating closer to the human search budget. Our proposed approach, combining search with domain knowledge, is not specific to board games, hinting at more general future applications.

Audrūnas Gruslys, Marc Lanctot, Rémi Munos et al.

Regret minimization has played a key role in online learning, equilibrium computation in games, and reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we describe a general model-free RL method for no-regret learning based on repeated reconsideration of past behavior. We propose a model-free RL algorithm, the AdvantageRegret-Matching Actor-Critic (ARMAC): rather than saving past state-action data, ARMAC saves a buffer of past policies, replaying through them to reconstruct hindsight assessments of past behavior. These retrospective value estimates are used to predict conditional advantages which, combined with regret matching, produces a new policy. In particular, ARMAC learns from sampled trajectories in a centralized training setting, without requiring the application of importance sampling commonly used in Monte Carlo counterfactual regret (CFR) minimization; hence, it does not suffer from excessive variance in large environments. In the single-agent setting, ARMAC shows an interesting form of exploration by keeping past policies intact. In the multiagent setting, ARMAC in self-play approaches Nash equilibria on some partially-observable zero-sum benchmarks. We provide exploitability estimates in the significantly larger game of betting-abstracted no-limit Texas Hold'em.