Fully Independent Communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Pina, Rafael, De Silva, Varuna, Artaud, Corentin, Liu, Xiaolan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Pina, Rafael
De Silva, Varuna
Artaud, Corentin
Liu, Xiaolan
author_facet Pina, Rafael
De Silva, Varuna
Artaud, Corentin
Liu, Xiaolan
contents Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) comprises a broad area of research within the field of multi-agent systems. Several recent works have focused specifically on the study of communication approaches in MARL. While multiple communication methods have been proposed, these might still be too complex and not easily transferable to more practical contexts. One of the reasons for that is due to the use of the famous parameter sharing trick. In this paper, we investigate how independent learners in MARL that do not share parameters can communicate. We demonstrate that this setting might incur into some problems, to which we propose a new learning scheme as a solution. Our results show that, despite the challenges, independent agents can still learn communication strategies following our method. Additionally, we use this method to investigate how communication in MARL is affected by different network capacities, both for sharing and not sharing parameters. We observe that communication may not always be needed and that the chosen agent network sizes need to be considered when used together with communication in order to achieve efficient learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_15059
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fully Independent Communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Pina, Rafael
De Silva, Varuna
Artaud, Corentin
Liu, Xiaolan
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) comprises a broad area of research within the field of multi-agent systems. Several recent works have focused specifically on the study of communication approaches in MARL. While multiple communication methods have been proposed, these might still be too complex and not easily transferable to more practical contexts. One of the reasons for that is due to the use of the famous parameter sharing trick. In this paper, we investigate how independent learners in MARL that do not share parameters can communicate. We demonstrate that this setting might incur into some problems, to which we propose a new learning scheme as a solution. Our results show that, despite the challenges, independent agents can still learn communication strategies following our method. Additionally, we use this method to investigate how communication in MARL is affected by different network capacities, both for sharing and not sharing parameters. We observe that communication may not always be needed and that the chosen agent network sizes need to be considered when used together with communication in order to achieve efficient learning.
title Fully Independent Communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15059