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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lo, Yat Long, Sengupta, Biswa, Foerster, Jakob, Noukhovitch, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01403
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author Lo, Yat Long
Sengupta, Biswa
Foerster, Jakob
Noukhovitch, Michael
author_facet Lo, Yat Long
Sengupta, Biswa
Foerster, Jakob
Noukhovitch, Michael
contents Communication is a powerful tool for coordination in multi-agent RL. But inducing an effective, common language is a difficult challenge, particularly in the decentralized setting. In this work, we introduce an alternative perspective where communicative messages sent between agents are considered as different incomplete views of the environment state. By examining the relationship between messages sent and received, we propose to learn to communicate using contrastive learning to maximize the mutual information between messages of a given trajectory. In communication-essential environments, our method outperforms previous work in both performance and learning speed. Using qualitative metrics and representation probing, we show that our method induces more symmetric communication and captures global state information from the environment. Overall, we show the power of contrastive learning and the importance of leveraging messages as encodings for effective communication.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_01403
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Multi-Agent Communication with Contrastive Learning
Lo, Yat Long
Sengupta, Biswa
Foerster, Jakob
Noukhovitch, Michael
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Communication is a powerful tool for coordination in multi-agent RL. But inducing an effective, common language is a difficult challenge, particularly in the decentralized setting. In this work, we introduce an alternative perspective where communicative messages sent between agents are considered as different incomplete views of the environment state. By examining the relationship between messages sent and received, we propose to learn to communicate using contrastive learning to maximize the mutual information between messages of a given trajectory. In communication-essential environments, our method outperforms previous work in both performance and learning speed. Using qualitative metrics and representation probing, we show that our method induces more symmetric communication and captures global state information from the environment. Overall, we show the power of contrastive learning and the importance of leveraging messages as encodings for effective communication.
title Learning Multi-Agent Communication with Contrastive Learning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01403