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Main Authors: Tang, Jingwu, Swamy, Gokul, Fang, Fei, Wu, Zhiwei Steven
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04219
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author Tang, Jingwu
Swamy, Gokul
Fang, Fei
Wu, Zhiwei Steven
author_facet Tang, Jingwu
Swamy, Gokul
Fang, Fei
Wu, Zhiwei Steven
contents We study a multi-agent imitation learning (MAIL) problem where we take the perspective of a learner attempting to coordinate a group of agents based on demonstrations of an expert doing so. Most prior work in MAIL essentially reduces the problem to matching the behavior of the expert within the support of the demonstrations. While doing so is sufficient to drive the value gap between the learner and the expert to zero under the assumption that agents are non-strategic, it does not guarantee robustness to deviations by strategic agents. Intuitively, this is because strategic deviations can depend on a counterfactual quantity: the coordinator's recommendations outside of the state distribution their recommendations induce. In response, we initiate the study of an alternative objective for MAIL in Markov Games we term the regret gap that explicitly accounts for potential deviations by agents in the group. We first perform an in-depth exploration of the relationship between the value and regret gaps. First, we show that while the value gap can be efficiently minimized via a direct extension of single-agent IL algorithms, even value equivalence can lead to an arbitrarily large regret gap. This implies that achieving regret equivalence is harder than achieving value equivalence in MAIL. We then provide a pair of efficient reductions to no-regret online convex optimization that are capable of minimizing the regret gap (a) under a coverage assumption on the expert (MALICE) or (b) with access to a queryable expert (BLADES).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_04219
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Agent Imitation Learning: Value is Easy, Regret is Hard
Tang, Jingwu
Swamy, Gokul
Fang, Fei
Wu, Zhiwei Steven
Machine Learning
We study a multi-agent imitation learning (MAIL) problem where we take the perspective of a learner attempting to coordinate a group of agents based on demonstrations of an expert doing so. Most prior work in MAIL essentially reduces the problem to matching the behavior of the expert within the support of the demonstrations. While doing so is sufficient to drive the value gap between the learner and the expert to zero under the assumption that agents are non-strategic, it does not guarantee robustness to deviations by strategic agents. Intuitively, this is because strategic deviations can depend on a counterfactual quantity: the coordinator's recommendations outside of the state distribution their recommendations induce. In response, we initiate the study of an alternative objective for MAIL in Markov Games we term the regret gap that explicitly accounts for potential deviations by agents in the group. We first perform an in-depth exploration of the relationship between the value and regret gaps. First, we show that while the value gap can be efficiently minimized via a direct extension of single-agent IL algorithms, even value equivalence can lead to an arbitrarily large regret gap. This implies that achieving regret equivalence is harder than achieving value equivalence in MAIL. We then provide a pair of efficient reductions to no-regret online convex optimization that are capable of minimizing the regret gap (a) under a coverage assumption on the expert (MALICE) or (b) with access to a queryable expert (BLADES).
title Multi-Agent Imitation Learning: Value is Easy, Regret is Hard
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04219