Abstract:The mixed cooperative-competitive multi-agent system consists of controlled target agents and uncontrolled external agents. The target agents cooperate with each other and compete with external agents, so as to deal with the dynamic changes in the environment and the external agents and complete tasks. In order to train the target agents and make them learn the optimal policy for completing the tasks, the existing work proposes two kinds of solutions: (1) focusing on the cooperation between target agents, viewing the external agents as a part of the environment, and leveraging the multi-agent-reinforcement learning to train the target agents; but these approaches cannot handle the uncertainty of or dynamic changes in the external agents’ policy; (2) focusing on the competition between target agents and external agents, modeling the competition as two-player games, and using a self-play approach to train the target agents; these approaches are only suitable for cases where there is one target agent and external agent, and they are difficult to be extended to a system consisting of multiple target agents and external agents. This study combines the two kinds of solutions and proposes a counterfactual regret advantage-based self-play approach. Specifically, first, based on the counterfactual regret minimization and counterfactual multi-agent policy gradient, the study designs a counterfactual regret advantage-based policy gradient approach for making the target agent update the policy more accurately. Second, in order to deal with the dynamic changes in the external agents’ policy during the self-play process, the study leverages imitation learning, which takes the external agents’ historical decision-making trajectories as training data and imitates the external agents’ policy, so as to explicitly model the external agents’ behaviors. Third, based on the counterfactual regret advantage-based policy gradient and the modeling of external agents’ behaviors, this study designs a self-play training approach. This approach can obtain the optimal joint policy for training multiple target agents when the external agents’ policy is uncertain or dynamically changing. The study also conducts a set of experiments on the cooperative electromagnetic countermeasure, including three typical mixed cooperative-competitive tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that compared with other approaches, the proposed approach has an improvement of at least 78% in the self-game effect.