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Register a new userContinuous Coordination As a Realistic Scenario for Lifelong Learning
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Added by
Hadi Nekoei
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Current deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are still highly task-specific and lack the ability to generalize to new environments. Lifelong learning (LLL), however, aims at solving multiple tasks sequentially by efficiently transferring and using knowledge between tasks. Despite a surge of interest in lifelong RL in recent years, the lack of a realistic testbed makes robust evaluation of LLL algorithms difficult. Multi-agent RL (MARL), on the other hand, can be seen as a natural scenario for lifelong RL due to its inherent non-stationarity, since the agents policies change over time. In this work, we introduce a multi-agent lifelong learning testbed that supports both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our setup is based on Hanabi -- a partially-observable, fully cooperative multi-agent game that has been shown to be challenging for zero-shot coordination. Its large strategy space makes it a desirable environment for lifelong RL tasks. We evaluate several recent MARL methods, and benchmark state-of-the-art LLL algorithms in limited memory and computation regimes to shed light on their strengths and weaknesses. This continual learning paradigm also provides us with a pragmatic way of going beyond centralized training which is the most commonly used training protocol in MARL. We empirically show that the agents trained in our setup are able to coordinate well with unseen agents, without any additional assumptions made by previous works. The code and all pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/Lifelong-Hanabi.
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Many cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning environments provide agents with a sparse team-based reward, as well as a dense agent-specific reward that incentivizes learning basic skills. Training policies solely on the team-based reward is often difficult due to its sparsity. Furthermore, relying solely on the agent-specific reward is sub-optimal because it usually does not capture the team coordination objective. A common approach is to use reward shaping to construct a proxy reward by combining the individual rewards. However, this requires manual tuning for each environment. We introduce Multiagent Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (MERL), a split-level training platform that handles the two objectives separately through two optimization processes. An evolutionary algorithm maximizes the sparse team-based objective through neuroevolution on a population of teams. Concurrently, a gradient-based optimizer trains policies to only maximize the dense agent-specific rewards. The gradient-based policies are periodically added to the evolutionary population as a way of information transfer between the two optimization processes. This enables the evolutionary algorithm to use skills learned via the agent-specific rewards toward optimizing the global objective. Results demonstrate that MERL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, such as MADDPG, on a number of difficult coordination benchmarks.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires coordination to efficiently solve certain tasks. Fully centralized control is often infeasible in such domains due to the size of joint action spaces. Coordination graph based formalization allows reasoning about the joint action based on the structure of interactions. However, they often require domain expertise in their design. This paper introduces the deep implicit coordination graph (DICG) architecture for such scenarios. DICG consists of a module for inferring the dynamic coordination graph structure which is then used by a graph neural network based module to learn to implicitly reason about the joint actions or values. DICG allows learning the tradeoff between full centralization and decentralization via standard actor-critic methods to significantly improve coordination for domains with large number of agents. We apply DICG to both centralized-training-centralized-execution and centralized-training-decentralized-execution regimes. We demonstrate that DICG solves the relative overgeneralization pathology in predatory-prey tasks as well as outperforms various MARL baselines on the challenging StarCraft II Multi-agent Challenge (SMAC) and traffic junction environments.
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.
Continuous control tasks in reinforcement learning are important because they provide an important framework for learning in high-dimensional state spaces with deceptive rewards, where the agent can easily become trapped into suboptimal solutions. One way to avoid local optima is to use a population of agents to ensure coverage of the policy space, yet learning a population with the best coverage is still an open problem. In this work, we present a novel approach to population-based RL in continuous control that leverages properties of normalizing flows to perform attractive and repulsive operations between current members of the population and previously observed policies. Empirical results on the MuJoCo suite demonstrate a high performance gain for our algorithm compared to prior work, including Soft-Actor Critic (SAC).
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.
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