Mastering the Game of Go with Self-play Experience Replay

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Liu, Jingbin, Wang, Xuechun
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Liu, Jingbin
Wang, Xuechun
author_facet Liu, Jingbin
Wang, Xuechun
contents The game of Go has long served as a benchmark for artificial intelligence, demanding sophisticated strategic reasoning and long-term planning. Previous approaches such as AlphaGo and its successors, have predominantly relied on model-based Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). In this work, we present QZero, a novel model-free reinforcement learning algorithm that forgoes search during training and learns a Nash equilibrium policy through self-play and off-policy experience replay. Built upon entropy-regularized Q-learning, QZero utilizes a single Q-value network to unify policy evaluation and improvement. Starting tabula rasa without human data and trained for 5 months with modest compute resources (7 GPUs), QZero achieved a performance level comparable to that of AlphaGo. This demonstrates, for the first time, the efficiency of using model-free reinforcement learning to master the game of Go, as well as the feasibility of off-policy reinforcement learning in solving large-scale and complex environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_03306
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mastering the Game of Go with Self-play Experience Replay
Liu, Jingbin
Wang, Xuechun
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The game of Go has long served as a benchmark for artificial intelligence, demanding sophisticated strategic reasoning and long-term planning. Previous approaches such as AlphaGo and its successors, have predominantly relied on model-based Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). In this work, we present QZero, a novel model-free reinforcement learning algorithm that forgoes search during training and learns a Nash equilibrium policy through self-play and off-policy experience replay. Built upon entropy-regularized Q-learning, QZero utilizes a single Q-value network to unify policy evaluation and improvement. Starting tabula rasa without human data and trained for 5 months with modest compute resources (7 GPUs), QZero achieved a performance level comparable to that of AlphaGo. This demonstrates, for the first time, the efficiency of using model-free reinforcement learning to master the game of Go, as well as the feasibility of off-policy reinforcement learning in solving large-scale and complex environments.
title Mastering the Game of Go with Self-play Experience Replay
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03306