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Discovering Expert-Level Air Combat Knowledge via Deep Excitatory-Inhibitory Factorized Reinforcement Learning

Published: 18 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved a wide range of successes in autonomous air combat decision-making recently. Previous research demonstrated that AI-enabled air combat approaches could even acquire beyond human-level capabilities. However, there remains a lack of evidence regarding two major difficulties. First, the existing methods with fixed decision intervals are mostly devoted to solving what to act but merely pay attention to when to act, which occasionally misses optimal decision opportunities. Second, the method of an expert-crafted finite maneuver library leads to a lack of tactics diversity, which is vulnerable to an opponent equipped with new tactics. In view of this, we propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and prior knowledge hybrid autonomous air combat tactics discovering algorithm, namely deep Excitatory-iNhibitory fACTorIzed maneuVEr (ENACTIVE) learning. The algorithm consists of two key modules, i.e., ENHANCE and FACTIVE. Specifically, ENHANCE learns to adjust the air combat decision-making intervals and appropriately seize key opportunities. FACTIVE factorizes maneuvers and then jointly optimizes them with significant tactics diversity increments. Extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with a 62% winning rate and further obtains a margin of a 2.85-fold increase in terms of global tactic space coverage. It also demonstrates that a variety of discovered air combat tactics are comparable to human experts’ knowledge.

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  • (2024)Cultivating Expertise in Deep and Reinforcement Learning PrinciplesDeep Reinforcement Learning and Its Industrial Use Cases10.1002/9781394272587.ch8(151-177)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2024

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
    ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology  Volume 15, Issue 4
    August 2024
    563 pages
    EISSN:2157-6912
    DOI:10.1145/3613644
    • Editor:
    • Huan Liu
    Issue’s Table of Contents

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 18 June 2024
    Online AM: 27 March 2024
    Accepted: 06 March 2024
    Revised: 07 October 2023
    Received: 11 June 2022
    Published in TIST Volume 15, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. Air combat
    2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
    3. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)
    4. Excitatory-Inhibitory (E/I) balance

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    • (2024)Cultivating Expertise in Deep and Reinforcement Learning PrinciplesDeep Reinforcement Learning and Its Industrial Use Cases10.1002/9781394272587.ch8(151-177)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2024

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