Benchmarking Robustness and Generalization in Multi-Agent Systems: A Case Study on Neural MMO

We present the results of the second Neural MMO challenge, hosted at IJCAI 2022, which received 1600+ submissions. This competition targets robustness and generalization in multi-agent systems: participants train teams of agents to complete a multi-task objective against opponents not seen during training. The competition combines relatively complex environment design with large numbers of agents in the environment. The top submissions demonstrate strong success on this task using mostly standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods combined with domain-specific engineering. We summarize the competition design and results and suggest that, as an academic community, competitions may be a powerful approach to solving hard problems and establishing a solid benchmark for algorithms. We will open-source our benchmark including the environment wrapper, baselines, a visualization tool, and selected policies for further research.

Emergent collective intelligence from massive-agent cooperation and competition

Inspired by organisms evolving through cooperation and competition between different populations on Earth, we study the emergence of artificial collective intelligence through massive-agent reinforcement learning. To this end, We propose a new massive-agent reinforcement learning environment, Lux, where dynamic and massive agents in two teams scramble for limited resources and fight off the darkness. In Lux, we build our agents through the standard reinforcement learning algorithm in curriculum learning phases and leverage centralized control via a pixel-to-pixel policy network. As agents co-evolve through self-play, we observe several stages of intelligence, from the acquisition of atomic skills to the development of group strategies. Since these learned group strategies arise from individual decisions without an explicit coordination mechanism, we claim that artificial collective intelligence emerges from massive-agent cooperation and competition. We further analyze the emergence of various learned strategies through metrics and ablation studies, aiming to provide insights for reinforcement learning implementations in massive-agent environments.

Seeking Common Ground While Reserving Differences: Multiple Anatomy Collaborative Framework for Undersampled MRI Reconstruction

Recently, deep neural networks have greatly advanced undersampled Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) reconstruction, wherein most studies follow the one-anatomy-one-network fashion, i.e., each expert network is trained and evaluated for a specific anatomy. Apart from inefficiency in training multiple independent models, such convention ignores the shared de-aliasing knowledge across various anatomies which can benefit each other. To explore the shared knowledge, one naive way is to combine all the data from various anatomies to train an all-round network. Unfortunately, despite the existence of the shared de-aliasing knowledge, we reveal that the exclusive knowledge across different anatomies can deteriorate specific reconstruction targets, yielding overall performance degradation. Observing this, in this study, we present a novel deep MRI reconstruction framework with both anatomy-shared and anatomy-specific parameterized learners, aiming to "seek common ground while reserving differences" across different anatomies.Particularly, the primary anatomy-shared learners are exposed to different anatomies to model flourishing shared knowledge, while the efficient anatomy-specific learners are trained with their target anatomy for exclusive knowledge. Four different implementations of anatomy-specific learners are presented and explored on the top of our framework in two MRI reconstruction networks. Comprehensive experiments on brain, knee and cardiac MRI datasets demonstrate that three of these learners are able to enhance reconstruction performance via multiple anatomy collaborative learning.