Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with One-hop Neighbors and Compute Straggler Mitigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Baoqian, Xie, Junfei, Atanasov, Nikolay
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Wang, Baoqian
Xie, Junfei
Atanasov, Nikolay
author_facet Wang, Baoqian
Xie, Junfei
Atanasov, Nikolay
contents Most multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods are limited in the scale of problems they can handle. With increasing numbers of agents, the number of training iterations required to find the optimal behaviors increases exponentially due to the exponentially growing joint state and action spaces. This paper tackles this limitation by introducing a scalable MARL method called Distributed multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with One-hop Neighbors (DARL1N). DARL1N is an off-policy actor-critic method that addresses the curse of dimensionality by restricting information exchanges among the agents to one-hop neighbors when representing value and policy functions. Each agent optimizes its value and policy functions over a one-hop neighborhood, significantly reducing the learning complexity, yet maintaining expressiveness by training with varying neighbor numbers and states. This structure allows us to formulate a distributed learning framework to further speed up the training procedure. Distributed computing systems, however, contain straggler compute nodes, which are slow or unresponsive due to communication bottlenecks, software or hardware problems. To mitigate the detrimental straggler effect, we introduce a novel coded distributed learning architecture, which leverages coding theory to improve the resilience of the learning system to stragglers. Comprehensive experiments show that DARL1N significantly reduces training time without sacrificing policy quality and is scalable as the number of agents increases. Moreover, the coded distributed learning architecture improves training efficiency in the presence of stragglers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2202_09019
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with One-hop Neighbors and Compute Straggler Mitigation
Wang, Baoqian
Xie, Junfei
Atanasov, Nikolay
Multiagent Systems
Machine Learning
Most multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods are limited in the scale of problems they can handle. With increasing numbers of agents, the number of training iterations required to find the optimal behaviors increases exponentially due to the exponentially growing joint state and action spaces. This paper tackles this limitation by introducing a scalable MARL method called Distributed multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with One-hop Neighbors (DARL1N). DARL1N is an off-policy actor-critic method that addresses the curse of dimensionality by restricting information exchanges among the agents to one-hop neighbors when representing value and policy functions. Each agent optimizes its value and policy functions over a one-hop neighborhood, significantly reducing the learning complexity, yet maintaining expressiveness by training with varying neighbor numbers and states. This structure allows us to formulate a distributed learning framework to further speed up the training procedure. Distributed computing systems, however, contain straggler compute nodes, which are slow or unresponsive due to communication bottlenecks, software or hardware problems. To mitigate the detrimental straggler effect, we introduce a novel coded distributed learning architecture, which leverages coding theory to improve the resilience of the learning system to stragglers. Comprehensive experiments show that DARL1N significantly reduces training time without sacrificing policy quality and is scalable as the number of agents increases. Moreover, the coded distributed learning architecture improves training efficiency in the presence of stragglers.
title Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with One-hop Neighbors and Compute Straggler Mitigation
topic Multiagent Systems
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09019