Probabilistic View of Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning: A Unified Approach

Shubham Gupta, Ambedkar Dukkipati

TL;DR: A probabilistic framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning

Abstract: Formulating the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in the framework of probabilistic inference not only offers a new perspective about RL, but also yields practical algorithms that are more robust and easier to train. While this connection between RL and probabilistic inference has been extensively studied in the single-agent setting, it has not yet been fully understood in the multi-agent setup. In this paper, we pose the problem of multi-agent reinforcement learning as the problem of performing inference in a particular graphical model. We model the environment, as seen by each of the agents, using separate but related Markov decision processes. We derive a practical off-policy maximum-entropy actor-critic algorithm that we call Multi-agent Soft Actor-Critic (MA-SAC) for performing approximate inference in the proposed model using variational inference. MA-SAC can be employed in both cooperative and competitive settings. Through experiments, we demonstrate that MA-SAC outperforms a strong baseline on several multi-agent scenarios. While MA-SAC is one resultant multi-agent RL algorithm that can be derived from the proposed probabilistic framework, our work provides a unified view of maximum-entropy algorithms in the multi-agent setting.

Keywords: multi-agent reinforcement learning, maximum entropy reinforcement learning