Towards Cost-Efficient Federated Multi-agent RL with Learnable Aggregation

Yi Zhang, Sen Wang, Zhi Chen, Xuwei Xu, Stano Funiak, Jiajun Liu

Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) often adopts centralized training with a decentralized execution (CTDE) framework to facilitate cooperation among agents. When it comes to deploying MARL algorithms in real-world scenarios, CTDE requires gradient transmission and parameter synchronization for each training step, which can incur disastrous communication overhead. To enhance communication efficiency, federated MARL is proposed to average the gradients periodically during communication. However, such straightforward averaging leads to poor coordination and slow convergence arising from the non-i.i.d. problem which is evidenced by our theoretical analysis. To address the two challenges, we propose a federated MARL framework, termed cost-efficient federated multi-agent reinforcement learning with learnable aggregation (FMRL-LA). Specifically, we use asynchronous critics to optimize communication efficiency by filtering out redundant local updates based on the estimation of agent utilities. A centralized aggregator rectifies these estimations conditioned on global information to improve cooperation and reduce non-i.i.d. impact by maximizing the composite system objectives. For a comprehensive evaluation, we extend a challenging multi-agent autonomous driving environment to the federated learning paradigm, comparing our method to competitive MARL baselines. Our findings indicate that FMRL-LA can adeptly balance performance and efficiency. Code and appendix can be found in https://github.com/ArronDZhang/FMRL_LA.