Papers › An Empirical Study on Google Research Football Multi-agent Scenarios

An Empirical Study on Google Research Football Multi-agent Scenarios

16 May 2023arXiv:2305.09458archive 2025-07-28

Yan Song, He Jiang, Zheng Tian, Haifeng Zhang, Yingping Zhang, Jiangcheng Zhu, Zonghong Dai, Weinan Zhang, Jun Wang

Few multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) research on Google Research Football (GRF) focus on the 11v11 multi-agent full-game scenario and to the best of our knowledge, no open benchmark on this scenario has been released to the public. In this work, we fill the gap by providing a population-based MARL training pipeline and hyperparameter settings on multi-agent football scenario that outperforms the bot with difficulty 1.0 from scratch within 2 million steps. Our experiments serve as a reference for the expected performance of Independent Proximal Policy Optimization (IPPO), a state-of-the-art multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm where each agent tries to maximize its own policy independently across various training configurations. Meanwhile, we open-source our training framework Light-MALib which extends the MALib codebase by distributed and asynchronized implementation with additional analytical tools for football games. Finally, we provide guidance for building strong football AI with population-based training and release diverse pretrained policies for benchmarking. The goal is to provide the community with a head start for whoever experiment their works on GRF and a simple-to-use population-based training framework for further improving their agents through self-play. The implementation is available at https://github.com/Shanghai-Digital-Brain-Laboratory/DB-Football.

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BenchmarkingMulti-agent Reinforcement LearningReinforcement Learningreinforcement-learning

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1x1 ConvolutionAdamBatch NormalizationBigGANConditional Batch NormalizationConvolutionDense ConnectionsEarly StoppingFeedforward NetworkGAN Hinge LossLinear LayerNon-Local BlockNon-Local OperationOff-Diagonal Orthogonal RegularizationProjection DiscriminatorReLUResidual BlockResidual ConnectionSAGANSoftmaxSpectral NormalizationTTURTruncation Trick

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