Efficient Subgame Refinement for Extensive-form Games

Subgame solving is an essential technique in addressing large imperfect information games, with various approaches developed to enhance the performance of refined strategies in the abstraction of the target subgame. However, directly applying existing subgame solving techniques may be difficult, due to the intricate nature and substantial size of many real-world games. To overcome this issue, recent subgame solving methods allow for subgame solving on limited knowledge order subgames, increasing their applicability in large games; yet this may still face obstacles due to extensive information set sizes. To address this challenge, we propose a generative subgame solving (GS2) framework, which utilizes a generation function to identify a subset of the earliest-reached nodes, reducing the size of the subgame. Our method is supported by a theoretical analysis and employs a diversity-based generation function to enhance safety. Experiments conducted on medium-sized games as well as the challenging large game of GuanDan demonstrate a significant improvement over the blueprint.