A Competition Winning Deep Reinforcement Learning Agent in microRTS
This provides a benchmark for future microRTS competitions and a starting point for DRL research, though it is incremental as it builds on existing DRL methods in a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents not winning the IEEE microRTS competition due to high training costs and complexity, resulting in RAISocketAI becoming the first DRL agent to win by regularly defeating prior winners in benchmarks.
Scripted agents have predominantly won the five previous iterations of the IEEE microRTS ($μ$RTS) competitions hosted at CIG and CoG. Despite Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms making significant strides in real-time strategy (RTS) games, their adoption in this primarily academic competition has been limited due to the considerable training resources required and the complexity inherent in creating and debugging such agents. RAISocketAI is the first DRL agent to win the IEEE microRTS competition. In a benchmark without performance constraints, RAISocketAI regularly defeated the two prior competition winners. This first competition-winning DRL submission can be a benchmark for future microRTS competitions and a starting point for future DRL research. Iteratively fine-tuning the base policy and transfer learning to specific maps were critical to RAISocketAI's winning performance. These strategies can be used to economically train future DRL agents. Further work in Imitation Learning using Behavior Cloning and fine-tuning these models with DRL has proven promising as an efficient way to bootstrap models with demonstrated, competitive behaviors.