Paper ID: 2308.15802

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

Yangkun Chen, Joseph Suarez, Junjie Zhang, Chenghui Yu, Bo Wu, Hanmo Chen, Hengman Zhu, Rui Du, Shanliang Qian, Shuai Liu, Weijun Hong, Jinke He, Yibing Zhang, Liang Zhao, Clare Zhu, Julian Togelius, Sharada Mohanty, Jiaxin Chen, Xiu Li, Xiaolong Zhu, Phillip Isola

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.

Submitted: Aug 30, 2023