We are excited to announce the Melting Pot Contest at NeurIPS 2023, organised by researchers from the Cooperative AI Foundation, MIT, and Google DeepMind. This new competition challenges researchers to push the boundaries of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for mixed-motive cooperation. The contest leverages the cutting-edge Melting Pot environment suite to rigorously evaluate how well agents can adapt their cooperative skills to interact with novel partners in unforeseen situations. Success requires demonstrating true cooperative intelligence. This event offers participants a unique opportunity to tackle open challenges in cooperative AI and to advance the frontier of deployable real-world AI systems.
Dive deep into the realm of multi-agent reinforcement learning and explore the intricacies of mixed-motive cooperation.
The Task
The aim of this challenge is to catalyse progress in deployable cooperative AI that complements human prosperity. Together we can build consensus on metrics for coordination, engage the broader AI community, and showcase AI’s immense potential for teamwork.
MeltingPot Suite
The Melting Pot suite provides a protocol for generating test scenarios to assess an agent population’s ability to generalise cooperation to new situations. Scenarios combine novel “background populations” of agents with substrates including classic social dilemmas like the Prisoner’s Dilemma and more complex mixed-motive coordination games. The contest features settings with up to sixteen simultaneous agents across four diverse environments, enabling robust evaluation of cooperative capabilities at scale.
Timeline
The contest timeline spans three months to allow participants to refine their solutions before final scoring:
- August 10: Phase I begins
- August 20: Compute funding provided
- October 31: Phase I ends and Phase II begins
- November 15: Phase II ends
- December 10-16: NeurIPS
Prizes
In recognition of outstanding achievements, we have earmarked a prize pool of $10,000.
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1st Prize: $5,000 -
2nd Prize: $3,000 -
3rd Prize: $2,000
Additionally, in our commitment to fostering inclusivity and diversity, the challenge boasts $50,000 in compute budget. Beyond the monetary rewards, top performers will receive an invitation to co-author a report for NeurIPS 2024. The details will be shared soon.
Share your feedback and suggestions over here.
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Meet other challenge participants like your on the discord channel.
All the best!