Learning Progress Driven Multi-Agent Curriculum

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhao, Wenshuai, Li, Zhiyuan, Pajarinen, Joni
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2022
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author Zhao, Wenshuai
Li, Zhiyuan
Pajarinen, Joni
author_facet Zhao, Wenshuai
Li, Zhiyuan
Pajarinen, Joni
contents The number of agents can be an effective curriculum variable for controlling the difficulty of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks. Existing work typically uses manually defined curricula such as linear schemes. We identify two potential flaws while applying existing reward-based automatic curriculum learning methods in MARL: (1) The expected episode return used to measure task difficulty has high variance; (2) Credit assignment difficulty can be exacerbated in tasks where increasing the number of agents yields higher returns which is common in many MARL tasks. To address these issues, we propose to control the curriculum by using a TD-error based *learning progress* measure and by letting the curriculum proceed from an initial context distribution to the final task specific one. Since our approach maintains a distribution over the number of agents and measures learning progress rather than absolute performance, which often increases with the number of agents, we alleviate problem (2). Moreover, the learning progress measure naturally alleviates problem (1) by aggregating returns. In three challenging sparse-reward MARL benchmarks, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2205_10016
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Progress Driven Multi-Agent Curriculum
Zhao, Wenshuai
Li, Zhiyuan
Pajarinen, Joni
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
The number of agents can be an effective curriculum variable for controlling the difficulty of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks. Existing work typically uses manually defined curricula such as linear schemes. We identify two potential flaws while applying existing reward-based automatic curriculum learning methods in MARL: (1) The expected episode return used to measure task difficulty has high variance; (2) Credit assignment difficulty can be exacerbated in tasks where increasing the number of agents yields higher returns which is common in many MARL tasks. To address these issues, we propose to control the curriculum by using a TD-error based *learning progress* measure and by letting the curriculum proceed from an initial context distribution to the final task specific one. Since our approach maintains a distribution over the number of agents and measures learning progress rather than absolute performance, which often increases with the number of agents, we alleviate problem (2). Moreover, the learning progress measure naturally alleviates problem (1) by aggregating returns. In three challenging sparse-reward MARL benchmarks, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
title Learning Progress Driven Multi-Agent Curriculum
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10016