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We present a scalable tree search planning algorithm for large multi-agent sequential decision problems that require dynamic collaboration. Teams of agents need to coordinate decisions in many domains, but naive approaches fail due to the exponential growth of the joint action space with the number of agents. We circumvent this complexity through an anytime approach that allows us to trade computation for approximation quality and also dynamically coordinate actions. Our algorithm comprises three elements: online planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), factored representations of local agent interactions with coordination graphs, and the iterative Max-Plus method for joint action selection. We evaluate our approach on the benchmark SysAdmin domain with static coordination graphs and achieve comparable performance with much lower computation cost than our MCTS baselines. We also introduce a multi-drone delivery domain with dynamic, i.e., state-dependent coordination graphs, and demonstrate how our approach scales to large problems on this domain that are intractable for other MCTS methods. We provide an open-source implementation of our algorithm at https://github.com/JuliaPOMDP/FactoredValueMCTS.jl.
Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs) arise in a variety of applications including target tracking, control of multi-robot swarms, and multiplayer games. A key challenge in MMDPs occurs when the state and action spaces grow exponentially in the number of agents, making computation of an optimal policy computationally intractable for medium- to large-scale problems. One property that has been exploited to mitigate this complexity is transition independence, in which each agents transition probabilities are independent of the states and actions of other agents. Transition independence enables factorization of the MMDP and computation of local agent policies but does not hold for arbitrary MMDPs. In this paper, we propose an approximate transition dependence property, called $delta$-transition dependence and develop a metric for quantifying how far an MMDP deviates from transition independence. Our definition of $delta$-transition dependence recovers transition independence as a special case when $delta$ is zero. We develop a polynomial time algorithm in the number of agents that achieves a provable bound on the global optimum when the reward functions are monotone increasing and submodular in the agent actions. We evaluate our approach on two case studies, namely, multi-robot control and multi-agent patrolling example.
The intelligent control of the traffic signal is critical to the optimization of transportation systems. To achieve global optimal traffic efficiency in large-scale road networks, recent works have focused on coordination among intersections, which have shown promising results. However, existing studies paid more attention to observations sharing among intersections (both explicit and implicit) and did not care about the consequences after decisions. In this paper, we design a multiagent coordination framework based on Deep Reinforcement Learning methods for traffic signal control, defined as {gamma}-Reward that includes both original {gamma}-Reward and {gamma}-Attention-Reward. Specifically, we propose the Spatial Differentiation method for coordination which uses the temporal-spatial information in the replay buffer to amend the reward of each action. A concise theoretical analysis that proves the proposed model can converge to Nash equilibrium is given. By extending the idea of Markov Chain to the dimension of space-time, this truly decentralized coordination mechanism replaces the graph attention method and realizes the decoupling of the road network, which is more scalable and more in line with practice. The simulation results show that the proposed model remains a state-of-the-art performance even not use a centralized setting. Code is available in https://github.com/Skylark0924/Gamma Reward.
This paper presents a distributed, efficient, scalable and real-time motion planning algorithm for a large group of agents moving in 2 or 3-dimensional spaces. This algorithm enables autonomous agents to generate individual trajectories independently with only the relative position information of neighboring agents. Each agent applies a force-based control that contains two main terms: collision avoidance and navigational feedback. The first term keeps two agents separate with a certain distance, while the second term attracts each agent toward its goal location. Compared with existing collision-avoidance algorithms, the proposed force-based motion planning (FMP) algorithm is able to find collision-free motions with lower transition time, free from velocity state information of neighbouring agents. It leads to less computational overhead. The performance of proposed FMP is examined over several dense and complex 2D and 3D benchmark simulation scenarios, with results outperforming existing methods.
Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) has been a popular paradigm in cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) settings and is widely used in many real applications. One of the major challenges in the training process is credit assignment, which aims to deduce the contributions of each agent according to the global rewards. Existing credit assignment methods focus on either decomposing the joint value function into individual value functions or measuring the impact of local observations and actions on the global value function. These approaches lack a thorough consideration of the complicated interactions among multiple agents, leading to an unsuitable assignment of credit and subsequently mediocre results on MARL. We propose Shapley Counterfactual Credit Assignment, a novel method for explicit credit assignment which accounts for the coalition of agents. Specifically, Shapley Value and its desired properties are leveraged in deep MARL to credit any combinations of agents, which grants us the capability to estimate the individual credit for each agent. Despite this capability, the main technical difficulty lies in the computational complexity of Shapley Value who grows factorially as the number of agents. We instead utilize an approximation method via Monte Carlo sampling, which reduces the sample complexity while maintaining its effectiveness. We evaluate our method on StarCraft II benchmarks across different scenarios. Our method outperforms existing cooperative MARL algorithms significantly and achieves the state-of-the-art, with especially large margins on tasks with more severe difficulties.
The ability to create artificial intelligence (AI) capable of performing complex tasks is rapidly outpacing our ability to ensure the safe and assured operation of AI-enabled systems. Fortunately, a landscape of AI safety research is emerging in response to this asymmetry and yet there is a long way to go. In particular, recent simulation environments created to illustrate AI safety risks are relatively simple or narrowly-focused on a particular issue. Hence, we see a critical need for AI safety research environments that abstract essential aspects of complex real-world applications. In this work, we introduce the AI safety TanksWorld as an environment for AI safety research with three essential aspects: competing performance objectives, human-machine teaming, and multi-agent competition. The AI safety TanksWorld aims to accelerate the advancement of safe multi-agent decision-making algorithms by providing a software framework to support competitions with both system performance and safety objectives. As a work in progress, this paper introduces our research objectives and learning environment with reference code and baseline performance metrics to follow in a future work.