Model-Based Decentralized Policy Optimization

Hao Luo, Jiechuan Jiang, Zongqing Lu

Keywords: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: A novel mode-based decentralized policy optimization algorithm

Abstract: Decentralized policy optimization has been commonly used in cooperative multi-agent tasks. However, since all agents are updating their policies simultaneously, from the perspective of individual agents, the environment is non-stationary, resulting in it being hard to guarantee monotonic policy improvement. To help the policy improvement be stable and monotonic, we propose model-based decentralized policy optimization (MDPO), which incorporates a latent variable function to help construct the transition and reward function from an individual perspective. We theoretically analyze that the policy optimization of MDPO is more stable than model-free decentralized policy optimization. Moreover, due to non-stationarity, the latent variable function is varying and hard to be modeled. We further propose a latent variable prediction method to reduce the error of latent variable function, which theoretically contributes to the monotonic policy improvement. Empirically, MDPO can indeed obtain superior performance than model-free decentralized policy optimization in a variety of cooperative multi-agent tasks.

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