## MA2QL: A Minimalist Approach to Fully Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

22 Sept 2022, 12:37 (modified: 15 Nov 2022, 06:48)ICLR 2023 Conference Blind SubmissionReaders: Everyone
Keywords: multi-agent reinforcement learning
TL;DR: A new algorithm for multi-agent reinforcement learning
Abstract: Decentralized learning has shown great promise for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, non-stationarity remains a significant challenge in fully decentralized learning. In the paper, we tackle the non-stationarity problem in the simplest and fundamental way and propose multi-agent alternate Q-learning (MA2QL), where agents take turns to update their Q-functions by Q-learning. MA2QL is a minimalist approach to fully decentralized cooperative MARL but is theoretically grounded. We prove that when each agent guarantees $\varepsilon$-convergence at each turn, their joint policy converges to a Nash equilibrium. In practice, MA2QL only requires minimal changes to independent Q-learning (IQL). We empirically evaluate MA2QL on a variety of cooperative multi-agent tasks. Results show MA2QL consistently outperforms IQL, which verifies the effectiveness of MA2QL, despite such minimal changes.
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Please Choose The Closest Area That Your Submission Falls Into: Reinforcement Learning (eg, decision and control, planning, hierarchical RL, robotics)
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