How much can change in a year? Revisiting Evaluation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Singh, Siddarth, Mahjoub, Omayma, de Kock, Ruan, Khlifi, Wiem, Vall, Abidine, Tessera, Kale-ab, Pretorius, Arnu
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Singh, Siddarth
Mahjoub, Omayma
de Kock, Ruan
Khlifi, Wiem
Vall, Abidine
Tessera, Kale-ab
Pretorius, Arnu
author_facet Singh, Siddarth
Mahjoub, Omayma
de Kock, Ruan
Khlifi, Wiem
Vall, Abidine
Tessera, Kale-ab
Pretorius, Arnu
contents Establishing sound experimental standards and rigour is important in any growing field of research. Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is one such nascent field. Although exciting progress has been made, MARL has recently come under scrutiny for replicability issues and a lack of standardised evaluation methodology, specifically in the cooperative setting. Although protocols have been proposed to help alleviate the issue, it remains important to actively monitor the health of the field. In this work, we extend the database of evaluation methodology previously published by containing meta-data on MARL publications from top-rated conferences and compare the findings extracted from this updated database to the trends identified in their work. Our analysis shows that many of the worrying trends in performance reporting remain. This includes the omission of uncertainty quantification, not reporting all relevant evaluation details and a narrowing of algorithmic development classes. Promisingly, we do observe a trend towards more difficult scenarios in SMAC-v1, which if continued into SMAC-v2 will encourage novel algorithmic development. Our data indicate that replicability needs to be approached more proactively by the MARL community to ensure trust in the field as we move towards exciting new frontiers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_08463
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How much can change in a year? Revisiting Evaluation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Singh, Siddarth
Mahjoub, Omayma
de Kock, Ruan
Khlifi, Wiem
Vall, Abidine
Tessera, Kale-ab
Pretorius, Arnu
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.11, I.2.0, A.0
Establishing sound experimental standards and rigour is important in any growing field of research. Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is one such nascent field. Although exciting progress has been made, MARL has recently come under scrutiny for replicability issues and a lack of standardised evaluation methodology, specifically in the cooperative setting. Although protocols have been proposed to help alleviate the issue, it remains important to actively monitor the health of the field. In this work, we extend the database of evaluation methodology previously published by containing meta-data on MARL publications from top-rated conferences and compare the findings extracted from this updated database to the trends identified in their work. Our analysis shows that many of the worrying trends in performance reporting remain. This includes the omission of uncertainty quantification, not reporting all relevant evaluation details and a narrowing of algorithmic development classes. Promisingly, we do observe a trend towards more difficult scenarios in SMAC-v1, which if continued into SMAC-v2 will encourage novel algorithmic development. Our data indicate that replicability needs to be approached more proactively by the MARL community to ensure trust in the field as we move towards exciting new frontiers.
title How much can change in a year? Revisiting Evaluation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
topic Artificial Intelligence
I.2.11, I.2.0, A.0
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08463