XP-MARL: Auxiliary Prioritization in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning to Address Non-Stationarity

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Jianye, Sobhy, Omar, Alrifaee, Bassam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Xu, Jianye
Sobhy, Omar
Alrifaee, Bassam
author_facet Xu, Jianye
Sobhy, Omar
Alrifaee, Bassam
contents Non-stationarity poses a fundamental challenge in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), arising from agents simultaneously learning and altering their policies. This creates a non-stationary environment from the perspective of each individual agent, often leading to suboptimal or even unconverged learning outcomes. We propose an open-source framework named XP-MARL, which augments MARL with auxiliary prioritization to address this challenge in cooperative settings. XP-MARL is 1) founded upon our hypothesis that prioritizing agents and letting higher-priority agents establish their actions first would stabilize the learning process and thus mitigate non-stationarity and 2) enabled by our proposed mechanism called action propagation, where higher-priority agents act first and communicate their actions, providing a more stationary environment for others. Moreover, instead of using a predefined or heuristic priority assignment, XP-MARL learns priority-assignment policies with an auxiliary MARL problem, leading to a joint learning scheme. Experiments in a motion-planning scenario involving Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) demonstrate that XP-MARL improves the safety of a baseline model by 84.4% and outperforms a state-of-the-art approach, which improves the baseline by only 12.8%. Code: github.com/cas-lab-munich/sigmarl
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_11852
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle XP-MARL: Auxiliary Prioritization in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning to Address Non-Stationarity
Xu, Jianye
Sobhy, Omar
Alrifaee, Bassam
Robotics
Computer Science and Game Theory
Multiagent Systems
Non-stationarity poses a fundamental challenge in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), arising from agents simultaneously learning and altering their policies. This creates a non-stationary environment from the perspective of each individual agent, often leading to suboptimal or even unconverged learning outcomes. We propose an open-source framework named XP-MARL, which augments MARL with auxiliary prioritization to address this challenge in cooperative settings. XP-MARL is 1) founded upon our hypothesis that prioritizing agents and letting higher-priority agents establish their actions first would stabilize the learning process and thus mitigate non-stationarity and 2) enabled by our proposed mechanism called action propagation, where higher-priority agents act first and communicate their actions, providing a more stationary environment for others. Moreover, instead of using a predefined or heuristic priority assignment, XP-MARL learns priority-assignment policies with an auxiliary MARL problem, leading to a joint learning scheme. Experiments in a motion-planning scenario involving Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) demonstrate that XP-MARL improves the safety of a baseline model by 84.4% and outperforms a state-of-the-art approach, which improves the baseline by only 12.8%. Code: github.com/cas-lab-munich/sigmarl
title XP-MARL: Auxiliary Prioritization in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning to Address Non-Stationarity
topic Robotics
Computer Science and Game Theory
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11852