Celebrating Diversity in Shared Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Chenghao Li, Tonghan Wang, Chengjie Wu, Qianchuan Zhao, Jun Yang, Chongjie Zhang

Keywords: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, Diverse Behaviors, Partial Parameter Sharing

Abstract: Recently, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown the promise to solve complex cooperative tasks. Its success is partly because of parameter sharing among agents. However, such sharing may lead agents to behave similarly and limit their coordination capacity. In this paper, we aim to introduce diversity in both optimization and representation of shared multi-agent reinforcement learning. Specifically, we propose an information-theoretical regularization to maximize the mutual information between agents' identities and their trajectories, encouraging extensive exploration and diverse individualized behaviors. In representation, we incorporate agent-specific modules in the shared neural network architecture, which are regularized by L1-norm to promote learning sharing among agents while keeping necessary diversity. Empirical results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Google Research Football and super hard StarCraft II micromanagement tasks.

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TL;DR: Encouraging agents to be diverse when necessary while maintaining the merits of parameter sharing, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Google Research Football and super hard StarCraft II micromanagement tasks.

Code: https://github.com/lich14/CDS