Wargaming at the Next Level
The AGILE project goal is an artificial intelligence that learns effective tactics and behaviors by playing adversarial games, such as 2v2 air-to-air engagement, at a human performance level. © 2019 Getty Images.
HRL Aims for Human-Level, Decision-Making Artificial Intelligence to Help Strategize, Engage, and Adapt in Multi-Agent Environments
HRL Laboratories, LLC, with The Boeing Company has been awarded a new project to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) decision-making engine for multi-agent military problems such as multi-domain wargaming and strategic battle management. The goal is to learn effective tactics and behaviors by playing adversarial games, such as 2v2 air-to-air engagement, at a human performance level.
Known as the Adversarial Game-based Iterative Learning Engine or AGILE, HRL will develop advanced reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, a type of machine learning that does not require any human-labeled data to train an AI agent.
“Recent advances in RL have used these types of algorithms to train AI agents to play against humans and win board games, such as Go or chess, that have very well-defined moves to specific places on a board,” said senior researcher Deepak Khosla, HRL’s principal investigator on AGILE. “Our AI strategies are similar to the ones developed for those games, but we are aiming to expand to multi-agent games with imperfect information and numerous variations that far exceed those in a deterministic game with perfect information such as Go or chess.”
The AGILE goal is a fully autonomous system that will make high-level decisions that humans usually make. “We’re ambitious with this system,” Khosla said. “Our goal is to show that a team of AI agents can play games to learn autonomous behaviors and human-like strategies in adversarial military engagement problems.”
The key innovation the HRL team hopes to introduce is reinforcement learning that exhibits robustness, scalability, and adaptability. The Boeing Company will focus on developing a variety of multi-agent scenarios and simulations as well as validation of AGILE performance.
The AGILE project is part of Serial Interactions in Imperfect Information Games Applied to Complex Military Decision Making (SI3-CMD), a program of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, focused on applying recent developments in artificial intelligence and game theory to complex military decision making in changing multi-agent environments.
HRL Laboratories, LLC, Malibu, California (hrl.com) is a corporate research-and-development laboratory owned by The Boeing Company and General Motors specializing in research into sensors and materials, information and systems sciences, applied electromagnetics, and microelectronics. HRL provides custom research and development and performs additional R&D contract services for its LLC member companies, the U.S. government, and other commercial companies.
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