AlphaExploitem: Learning to Exploit Suboptimal Play in Poker by Harnessing Complete Game Histories

Poster B: Monday -- 16:00 - 18:00

Vlad Murgoci, Matthijs T. J. Spaan, Yaniv Oren

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Poker, Exploitation, Transformer, PPO

Poker is an imperfect information game that has served as a long-standing benchmark for decision-making under uncertainty. To maximize utility beyond the Nash equilibrium, an agent can deviate from Nash-equilibrium policies to exploit suboptimal play. We introduce AlphaExploitem, which extends the competitive RL poker agent AlphaHoldem by using a hierarchical transformer encoder that enables reasoning over previously played hands and modifying the training procedure with the inclusion of a diverse pool of exploitable opponents to facilitate learning to exploit. We train and evaluate AlphaExploitem on two standard benchmarks for imperfect-information games. Empirically, AlphaExploitem successfully exploits weak play by both in- and out-of-distribution opponents, without losing performance against NE opponents.