LOPT: Learning Optimal Pigovian Tax in Sequential Social Dilemmas

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hua, Yun, Gao, Shang, Li, Wenhao, Chen, Haosheng, Jin, Bo, Wang, Xiangfeng, Luo, Jun, Zha, Hongyuan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Hua, Yun
Gao, Shang
Li, Wenhao
Chen, Haosheng
Jin, Bo
Wang, Xiangfeng
Luo, Jun
Zha, Hongyuan
author_facet Hua, Yun
Gao, Shang
Li, Wenhao
Chen, Haosheng
Jin, Bo
Wang, Xiangfeng
Luo, Jun
Zha, Hongyuan
contents In multi-agent reinforcement learning, each agent acts to maximize its individual accumulated rewards. Nevertheless, individual accumulated rewards could not fully reflect how others perceive them, resulting in selfish behaviors that undermine global performance. The externality theory, defined as ``the activities of one economic actor affect the activities of another in ways that are not reflected in market transactions,'' is applicable to analyze the social dilemmas in MARL. One of its most profound non-market solutions, ``Pigovian Tax'', which internalizes externalities by taxing those who create negative externalities and subsidizing those who create positive externalities, could aid in developing a mechanism to resolve MARL's social dilemmas. The purpose of this paper is to apply externality theory to analyze social dilemmas in MARL. To internalize the externalities in MARL, the \textbf{L}earning \textbf{O}ptimal \textbf{P}igovian \textbf{T}ax method (LOPT), is proposed, where an additional agent is introduced to learn the tax/allowance allocation policy so as to approximate the optimal ``Pigovian Tax'' which accurately reflects the externalities for all agents. Furthermore, a reward shaping mechanism based on the approximated optimal ``Pigovian Tax'' is applied to reduce the social cost of each agent and tries to alleviate the social dilemmas. Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, the proposed LOPT leads to higher collective social welfare in both the Escape Room and the Cleanup environments, which shows the superiority of our method in solving social dilemmas.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_06227
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LOPT: Learning Optimal Pigovian Tax in Sequential Social Dilemmas
Hua, Yun
Gao, Shang
Li, Wenhao
Chen, Haosheng
Jin, Bo
Wang, Xiangfeng
Luo, Jun
Zha, Hongyuan
Multiagent Systems
In multi-agent reinforcement learning, each agent acts to maximize its individual accumulated rewards. Nevertheless, individual accumulated rewards could not fully reflect how others perceive them, resulting in selfish behaviors that undermine global performance. The externality theory, defined as ``the activities of one economic actor affect the activities of another in ways that are not reflected in market transactions,'' is applicable to analyze the social dilemmas in MARL. One of its most profound non-market solutions, ``Pigovian Tax'', which internalizes externalities by taxing those who create negative externalities and subsidizing those who create positive externalities, could aid in developing a mechanism to resolve MARL's social dilemmas. The purpose of this paper is to apply externality theory to analyze social dilemmas in MARL. To internalize the externalities in MARL, the \textbf{L}earning \textbf{O}ptimal \textbf{P}igovian \textbf{T}ax method (LOPT), is proposed, where an additional agent is introduced to learn the tax/allowance allocation policy so as to approximate the optimal ``Pigovian Tax'' which accurately reflects the externalities for all agents. Furthermore, a reward shaping mechanism based on the approximated optimal ``Pigovian Tax'' is applied to reduce the social cost of each agent and tries to alleviate the social dilemmas. Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, the proposed LOPT leads to higher collective social welfare in both the Escape Room and the Cleanup environments, which shows the superiority of our method in solving social dilemmas.
title LOPT: Learning Optimal Pigovian Tax in Sequential Social Dilemmas
topic Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.06227