It Takes Four to Tango: Multiagent Selfplay for Automatic Curriculum Generation

Abstract: We are interested in training general-purpose reinforcement learning agents that can solve a wide variety of goals. Training such agents efficiently requires automatic generation of a goal curriculum. This is challenging as it requires (a) exploring goals of increasing difficulty, while ensuring that the agent (b) is exposed to a diverse set of goals in a sample efficient manner and (c) does not catastrophically forget previously solved goals. We propose Curriculum Self Play (CuSP), an automated goal generation framework that seeks to satisfy these desiderata by virtue of a multi-player game with four agents. We extend the asymmetric curricula learning in PAIRED (Dennis et al., 2020) to a symmetrized game that carefully balances cooperation and competition between two off-policy student learners and two regret-maximizing teachers. CuSP additionally introduces entropic goal coverage and accounts for the non-stationary nature of the students, allowing us to automatically induce a curriculum that balances progressive exploration with anti-catastrophic exploitation. We demonstrate that our method succeeds at generating an effective curricula of goals for a range of control tasks, outperforming other methods at zero-shot test-time generalization to novel out-of-distribution goals.