POSGGym: a library for decision-theoretic planning and learning in partially observable, multi-agent environments

Abstract Seamless integration of Planning Under Uncertainty and Reinforcement Learning (RL) promises to bring the best of both model-driven and data-driven worlds to multi-agent decision-making, resulting in an approach with assurances on performance that scales well to more complex problems. Despite this potential, progress in developing such methods has been hindered by the lack of adequate evaluation and simulation platforms. Researchers have had to rely on creating custom environments, which reduces efficiency and makes comparing new methods difficult. In this paper, we introduce POSGGym : a library for facilitating planning and RL research in partially observable, multi-agent domains. It provides a diverse collection of discrete and continuous environments, complete with their dynamics models and a reference set of policies that can be used to evaluate generalization to novel co-players. Leveraging POSGGym, we empirically investigate existing state-of-the-art planning methods and a method that combines planning and RL in the type-based reasoning setting. Our experiments corroborate that combining planning and RL can yield superior performance compared to planning or RL alone, given the model of the environment and other agents is correct. However, our particular setup also reveals that this integrated approach could result in worse performance when the model of other agents is incorrect. Our findings indicate the benefit of integrating planning and RL in partially observable, multi-agent domains, while serving to highlight several important directions for future research. Code available at: https://github.com/RDLLab/posggym .