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Register a new userTarMAC: Targeted Multi-Agent Communication
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Abhishek Das
Publication date
2018
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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We propose a targeted communication architecture for multi-agent reinforcement learning, where agents learn both what messages to send and whom to address them to while performing cooperative tasks in partially-observable environments. This targeting behavior is learnt solely from downstream task-specific reward without any communication supervision. We additionally augment this with a multi-round communication approach where agents coordinate via multiple rounds of communication before taking actions in the environment. We evaluate our approach on a diverse set of cooperative multi-agent tasks, of varying difficulties, with varying number of agents, in a variety of environments ranging from 2D grid layouts of shapes and simulated traffic junctions to 3D indoor environments, and demonstrate the benefits of targeted and multi-round communication. Moreover, we show that the targeted communication strategies learned by agents are interpretable and intuitive. Finally, we show that our architecture can be easily extended to mixed and competitive environments, leading to improved performance and sample complexity over recent state-of-the-art approaches.
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We consider the problem where $N$ agents collaboratively interact with an instance of a stochastic $K$ arm bandit problem for $K gg N$. The agents aim to simultaneously minimize the cumulative regret over all the agents for a total of $T$ time steps, the number of communication rounds, and the number of bits in each communication round. We present Limited Communication Collaboration - Upper Confidence Bound (LCC-UCB), a doubling-epoch based algorithm where each agent communicates only after the end of the epoch and shares the index of the best arm it knows. With our algorithm, LCC-UCB, each agent enjoys a regret of $tilde{O}left(sqrt{({K/N}+ N)T}right)$, communicates for $O(log T)$ steps and broadcasts $O(log K)$ bits in each communication step. We extend the work to sparse graphs with maximum degree $K_G$, and diameter $D$ and propose LCC-UCB-GRAPH which enjoys a regret bound of $tilde{O}left(Dsqrt{(K/N+ K_G)DT}right)$. Finally, we empirically show that the LCC-UCB and the LCC-UCB-GRAPH algorithm perform well and outperform strategies that communicate through a central node
We discuss the problem of learning collaborative behaviour through communication in multi-agent systems using deep reinforcement learning. A connectivity-driven communication (CDC) algorithm is proposed to address three key aspects: what agents to involve in the communication, what information content to share, and how often to share it. The multi-agent system is modelled as a weighted graph with nodes representing agents. The unknown edge weights reflect the degree of communication between pairs of agents, which depends on a diffusion process on the graph - the heat kernel. An optimal communication strategy, tightly coupled with overall graph topology, is learned end-to-end concurrently with the agents policy so as to maximise future expected returns. Empirical results show that CDC is capable of superior performance over alternative algorithms for a range of cooperative navigation tasks, and that the learned graph structures can be interpretable.
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have recently been used to train multiple interacting agents in a centralised manner whilst keeping their execution decentralised. When the agents can only acquire partial observations and are faced with tasks requiring coordination and synchronisation skills, inter-agent communication plays an essential role. In this work, we propose a framework for multi-agent training using deep deterministic policy gradients that enables concurrent, end-to-end learning of an explicit communication protocol through a memory device. During training, the agents learn to perform read and write operations enabling them to infer a shared representation of the world. We empirically demonstrate that concurrent learning of the communication device and individual policies can improve inter-agent coordination and performance in small-scale systems. Our experimental results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance in scenarios with up to six agents. We illustrate how different communication patterns can emerge on six different tasks of increasing complexity. Furthermore, we study the effects of corrupting the communication channel, provide a visualisation of the time-varying memory content as the underlying task is being solved and validate the building blocks of the proposed memory device through ablation studies.
Learning communication via deep reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning (IL) has recently been shown to be an effective way to solve Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF). However, existing communication based MAPF solvers focus on broadcast communication, where an agent broadcasts its message to all other or predefined agents. It is not only impractical but also leads to redundant information that could even impair the multi-agent cooperation. A succinct communication scheme should learn which information is relevant and influential to each agents decision making process. To address this problem, we consider a request-reply scenario and propose Decision Causal Communication (DCC), a simple yet efficient model to enable agents to select neighbors to conduct communication during both training and execution. Specifically, a neighbor is determined as relevant and influential only when the presence of this neighbor causes the decision adjustment on the central agent. This judgment is learned only based on agents local observation and thus suitable for decentralized execution to handle large scale problems. Empirical evaluation in obstacle-rich environment indicates the high success rate with low communication overhead of our method.
Through multi-agent competition, the simple objective of hide-and-seek, and standard reinforcement learning algorithms at scale, we find that agents create a self-supervised autocurriculum inducing multiple distinct rounds of emergent strategy, many of which require sophisticated tool use and coordination. We find clear evidence of six emergent phases in agent strategy in our environment, each of which creates a new pressure for the opposing team to adapt; for instance, agents learn to build multi-object shelters using moveable boxes which in turn leads to agents discovering that they can overcome obstacles using ramps. We further provide evidence that multi-agent competition may scale better with increasing environment complexity and leads to behavior that centers around far more human-relevant skills than other self-supervised reinforcement learning methods such as intrinsic motivation. Finally, we propose transfer and fine-tuning as a way to quantitatively evaluate targeted capabilities, and we compare hide-and-seek agents to both intrinsic motivation and random initialization baselines in a suite of domain-specific intelligence tests.
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