LightZero: A Unified Benchmark for Monte Carlo Tree Search in General Sequential Decision Scenarios

Yazhe Niu^1,3  Yuan Pu²  Zhenjie Yang¹  Xueyan Li²  Tong Zhou¹

Jiyuan Ren²  Shuai Hu¹  Hongsheng Li^{3,4 ∗} Yu Liu^1,2

¹SenseTime Group LTD

²Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

³The Chinese University of Hong Kong

⁴Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence

Abstract

Building agents based on tree-search planning capabilities with learned models has achieved remarkable success in classic decision-making problems, such as Go and Atari. However, it has been deemed challenging or even infeasible to extend Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based algorithms to diverse real-world applications, especially when these environments involve complex action spaces and significant simulation costs, or inherent stochasticity. In this work, we introduce LightZero, the first unified benchmark for deploying MCTS/MuZero in general sequential decision scenarios. Specificially, we summarize the most critical challenges in designing a general MCTS-style decision-making solver, then decompose the tightly-coupled algorithm and system design of tree-search RL methods into distinct sub-modules. By incorporating more appropriate exploration and optimization strategies, we can significantly enhance these sub-modules and construct powerful LightZero agents to tackle tasks across a wide range of domains, such as board games, Atari, MuJoCo, MiniGrid and GoBigger. Detailed benchmark results reveal the significant potential of such methods in building scalable and efficient decision intelligence. The code is available as part of OpenDILab at https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero.