Outbidding and Outbluffing Elite Humans: Mastering Liar's Poker via Self-Play and Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Dewey, Richard, Botyanszki, Janos, Moallemi, Ciamac C., Zheng, Andrew T.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Dewey, Richard
Botyanszki, Janos
Moallemi, Ciamac C.
Zheng, Andrew T.
author_facet Dewey, Richard
Botyanszki, Janos
Moallemi, Ciamac C.
Zheng, Andrew T.
contents AI researchers have long focused on poker-like games as a testbed for environments characterized by multi-player dynamics, imperfect information, and reasoning under uncertainty. While recent breakthroughs have matched elite human play at no-limit Texas hold'em, the multi-player dynamics are subdued: most hands converge quickly with only two players engaged through multiple rounds of bidding. In this paper, we present Solly, the first AI agent to achieve elite human play in reduced-format Liar's Poker, a game characterized by extensive multi-player engagement. We trained Solly using self-play with a model-free, actor-critic, deep reinforcement learning algorithm. Solly played at an elite human level as measured by win rate (won over 50% of hands) and equity (money won) in heads-up and multi-player Liar's Poker. Solly also outperformed large language models (LLMs), including those with reasoning abilities, on the same metrics. Solly developed novel bidding strategies, randomized play effectively, and was not easily exploitable by world-class human players.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Outbidding and Outbluffing Elite Humans: Mastering Liar's Poker via Self-Play and Reinforcement Learning
Dewey, Richard
Botyanszki, Janos
Moallemi, Ciamac C.
Zheng, Andrew T.
Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
AI researchers have long focused on poker-like games as a testbed for environments characterized by multi-player dynamics, imperfect information, and reasoning under uncertainty. While recent breakthroughs have matched elite human play at no-limit Texas hold'em, the multi-player dynamics are subdued: most hands converge quickly with only two players engaged through multiple rounds of bidding. In this paper, we present Solly, the first AI agent to achieve elite human play in reduced-format Liar's Poker, a game characterized by extensive multi-player engagement. We trained Solly using self-play with a model-free, actor-critic, deep reinforcement learning algorithm. Solly played at an elite human level as measured by win rate (won over 50% of hands) and equity (money won) in heads-up and multi-player Liar's Poker. Solly also outperformed large language models (LLMs), including those with reasoning abilities, on the same metrics. Solly developed novel bidding strategies, randomized play effectively, and was not easily exploitable by world-class human players.
title Outbidding and Outbluffing Elite Humans: Mastering Liar's Poker via Self-Play and Reinforcement Learning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03724