Transfer among Agents: An Efficient Multiagent Transfer Learning Framework

Tianpei Yang, Jianye HAO, Weixun Wang, Hongyao Tang, Zhaopeng Meng, Hangyu Mao, Dong Li, Wulong Liu, Yujing Hu, Yingfeng Chen, Changjie Fan

Keywords: Multiagent learning, transfer learning, reinforcement learning

Abstract: Transfer Learning has shown great potential to enhance the single-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL) efficiency, by sharing learned policies of previous tasks. Similarly, in multiagent settings, the learning performance can also be promoted if agents can share knowledge between each other. However, it remains an open question of how an agent should learn from other agents' knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel multiagent option-based policy transfer (MAOPT) framework to improve multiagent learning efficiency. Our framework learns what advice to give to each agent and when to terminate it by modeling multiagent policy transfer as the option learning problem. MAOPT provides different kinds of variants which can be classified into two types in terms of the experience used during training. One type is the MAOPT with the Global Option Advisor which has the access to the global information of the environment. However, in many realistic scenarios, we can only obtain each agent's local information due to the partial observation. The other type contains MAOPT with the Local Option Advisor and MAOPT with the Successor Representation Option (SRO) which are suitable for this setting and collect each agent's local experience for the update. In many cases, each agent's experience is inconsistent with each other which causes the option-value estimation to oscillate and to become inaccurate. SRO is used to handle the experience inconsistency by decoupling the dynamics of the environment from the rewards to learn the option-value function under each agent's preference. MAOPT can be easily combined with existing deep RL approaches. Experimental results show it significantly boosts the performance of existing deep RL methods in both discrete and continuous state spaces.

One-sentence Summary: A novel multiagent option-based transfer learning (MAOPT) framework is proposed to improve multiagent learning efficiency.

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