Improving Human-AI Coordination through Online Adversarial Training and Generative Models

Being able to cooperate with diverse humans is an important component of many economically valuable AI tasks, from household robotics to autonomous driving. However, generalizing to novel humans requires training on data that captures the diversity of human behaviors. Adversarial training is a promising method that allows dynamic data generation and ensures that agents are robust. It creates a feedback loop where the agent’s performance influences the generation of new adversarial data, which can be used immediately to train the agent. However, adversarial training is difficult to apply in a cooperative task; how can we train an adversarial cooperator? We propose a novel strategy that combines a pre-trained generative model to simulate valid cooperative agent policies with adversarial training to maximize regret. We call our method \textbf{GOAT}: \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{O}nline \textbf{A}dversarial \textbf{T}raining. In this framework, the GOAT dynamically searches the latent space of the generative model for coordination strategies where the learning policy---the Cooperator agent---underperforms. GOAT enables better generalization by exposing the Cooperator to various challenging interaction scenarios. We maintain realistic coordination strategies by keeping the generative model frozen, thus avoiding adversarial exploitation. We evaluate GOAT with real human partners, and the results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the Overcooked benchmark, highlighting its effectiveness in generalizing to diverse human behaviors.