Multi-agent Fault-tolerant Reinforcement Learning with Noisy Environments

Canhui Luo, Xuan Liu, Xinning Chen, Juan Luo

Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning system is used to solve the problem that agents achieve specific goals in the interaction with the environment through learning policies. Almost all existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods assume that the observation of the agents is accurate during the training process. It does not take into account that the observation may be wrong due to the complexity of the actual environment or the existence of dishonest agents, which will make the agent training difficult to succeed. In this paper, considering the limitations of the traditional multi-agent algorithm framework in noisy environments, we propose a multi-agent fault-tolerant reinforcement learning (MAFTRL) algorithm. Our main idea is to establish the agent's own error detection mechanism and design the information communication medium between agents. The error detection mechanism is based on the autoencoder, which calculates the credibility of each agent's observation and effectively reduces the environmental noise. The communication medium based on the attention mechanism can significantly improve the ability of agents to extract effective information. Experimental results show that our approach accurately detects the error observation of the agent, which has good performance and strong robustness in both the traditional reliable environment and the noisy environment. Moreover, MAFTRL significantly outperforms the traditional methods in the noisy environment.