This is the repository associated with the research paper "Transformers as Policies for Variable Action Environments" (paper, presentation) presented at the 18th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-22) - Strategy games. It describes a scalable transformer architecture that is used to train an RL agent in the Micro-RTS environment, which has managed to outperform other RL agents in this variable action environment in terms of computational cost and episodic return. We provide installation and running instructions in the following sections.

Install dependencies with pip install -r requirements.txt --extra-index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu113.

Note here that we assume a CUDA version 11.3 for GPU-based training. To disable the GPU usage or upgrade the dependency, you will need to modify requirements.txt.

During training, we use Weights and Biases to checkpoint and monitor the agent. We provide an example runs of the agent here. You can enable wandb by using the flag --prod-mode. We have two trainable agents:

• train_agent.py - a basic transformer network that can train on the 8x8 map.
• train_embedded_agent.py - same a train_agent.py but we use an embedding on the input to accommodate a larger 16x16 map.

Here is an example command to train the 8x8 agent:

python train_agent.py new --exp-name my-training-run --map-size 8

Where the full extent of input arguments can be seen with train_agent.py new -h. If using wandb this run will generate a run-id. We can interrupt the training at any time and resume it again using this run-id:

python train_agent.py resume --run-id <run-id>

A similar set of commands applies to the 16x16 agent:

python train_embedded_agent.py new --exp-name my-other-training-run --map-size 16

python train_embedded_agent.py resume --run-id <run-id>

Again, there are many more run-time parameters to configure (train_embedded_agent.py new -h). The best known agent uses the default parameters.

We evaluate against 13 AI opponents:

all_ais = {
    "guidedRojoA3N": microrts_ai.guidedRojoA3N,
    "randomBiasedAI": microrts_ai.randomBiasedAI,
    "randomAI": microrts_ai.randomAI,
    "passiveAI": microrts_ai.passiveAI,
    "workerRushAI": microrts_ai.workerRushAI,
    "lightRushAI": microrts_ai.lightRushAI,
    "coacAI": microrts_ai.coacAI,
    "naiveMCTSAI": microrts_ai.naiveMCTSAI,
    "mixedBot": microrts_ai.mixedBot,
    "rojo": microrts_ai.rojo,
    "izanagi": microrts_ai.izanagi,
    "tiamat": microrts_ai.tiamat,
    "droplet": microrts_ai.droplet,
}

To run the evaluation on the 8x8 agent use:

python evaluate_agent.py base --agent-model-path example_models/8x8/agent.pt --exp-name 8x8_evaluation --map-size 8 --num-eval-runs 100

And similarly for the 16x16 agent:

python evaluate_agent.py embedded --agent-model-path example_models/16x16/agent.pt --exp-name 16x16_evaluation --map-size 16 --num-eval-runs 100

Where example_models contains the already trained models. If using your own model, set your own --agent-model-path. We also provide the generated output evaluation under evaluation.

This paper is still waiting for the publisher to release the notebook. For now, please cite as:

@misc{zwingenberger2023transformers,
      title={Transformers as Policies for Variable Action Environments}, 
      author={Niklas Zwingenberger},
      year={2023},
      eprint={2301.03679},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.AI}
}