Communication Learning in Multi-Agent Systems from Graph Modeling Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hu, Shengchao, Shen, Li, Zhang, Ya, Tao, Dacheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866916464429105152
author Hu, Shengchao
Shen, Li
Zhang, Ya
Tao, Dacheng
author_facet Hu, Shengchao
Shen, Li
Zhang, Ya
Tao, Dacheng
contents In numerous artificial intelligence applications, the collaborative efforts of multiple intelligent agents are imperative for the successful attainment of target objectives. To enhance coordination among these agents, a distributed communication framework is often employed. However, indiscriminate information sharing among all agents can be resource-intensive, and the adoption of manually pre-defined communication architectures imposes constraints on inter-agent communication, thus limiting the potential for effective collaboration. Moreover, the communication framework often remains static during inference, which may result in sustained high resource consumption, as in most cases, only key decisions necessitate information sharing among agents. In this study, we introduce a novel approach wherein we conceptualize the communication architecture among agents as a learnable graph. We formulate this problem as the task of determining the communication graph while enabling the architecture parameters to update normally, thus necessitating a bi-level optimization process. Utilizing continuous relaxation of the graph representation and incorporating attention units, our proposed approach, CommFormer, efficiently optimizes the communication graph and concurrently refines architectural parameters through gradient descent in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a temporal gating mechanism for each agent, enabling dynamic decisions on whether to receive shared information at a given time, based on current observations, thus improving decision-making efficiency. Extensive experiments on a variety of cooperative tasks substantiate the robustness of our model across diverse cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies regardless of changes in the number of agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_00382
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Communication Learning in Multi-Agent Systems from Graph Modeling Perspective
Hu, Shengchao
Shen, Li
Zhang, Ya
Tao, Dacheng
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
In numerous artificial intelligence applications, the collaborative efforts of multiple intelligent agents are imperative for the successful attainment of target objectives. To enhance coordination among these agents, a distributed communication framework is often employed. However, indiscriminate information sharing among all agents can be resource-intensive, and the adoption of manually pre-defined communication architectures imposes constraints on inter-agent communication, thus limiting the potential for effective collaboration. Moreover, the communication framework often remains static during inference, which may result in sustained high resource consumption, as in most cases, only key decisions necessitate information sharing among agents. In this study, we introduce a novel approach wherein we conceptualize the communication architecture among agents as a learnable graph. We formulate this problem as the task of determining the communication graph while enabling the architecture parameters to update normally, thus necessitating a bi-level optimization process. Utilizing continuous relaxation of the graph representation and incorporating attention units, our proposed approach, CommFormer, efficiently optimizes the communication graph and concurrently refines architectural parameters through gradient descent in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a temporal gating mechanism for each agent, enabling dynamic decisions on whether to receive shared information at a given time, based on current observations, thus improving decision-making efficiency. Extensive experiments on a variety of cooperative tasks substantiate the robustness of our model across diverse cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies regardless of changes in the number of agents.
title Communication Learning in Multi-Agent Systems from Graph Modeling Perspective
topic Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00382