Actor-Attention-Critic for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Shariq Iqbal, Fei Sha

Abstract: Reinforcement learning in multi-agent scenarios is important for real-world applications but presents challenges beyond those seen in single-agent settings. We present an actor-critic algorithm that trains decentralized policies in multi-agent settings, using centrally computed critics that share an attention mechanism which selects relevant information for each agent at every timestep. This attention mechanism enables more effective and scalable learning in complex multi-agent environments, when compared to recent approaches. Our approach is applicable not only to cooperative settings with shared rewards, but also individualized reward settings, including adversarial settings, and it makes no assumptions about the action spaces of the agents. As such, it is flexible enough to be applied to most multi-agent learning problems

Keywords: multi-agent, reinforcement learning, attention, actor-critic

TL;DR: We propose an approach to learn decentralized policies in multi-agent settings using attention-based critics and demonstrate promising results in environments with complex interactions.

Code: [ shariqiqbal2810/MAAC](https://github.com/shariqiqbal2810/MAAC) + [ 2 community implementations](https://paperswithcode.com/paper/?openreview=HJx7l309Fm)

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1810.02912/code)