Learning to Share in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Yuxuan Yi, Ge Li, Yaowei Wang, Zongqing Lu

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of networked multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where a number of agents are deployed as a partially connected network. Networked MARL requires all agents make decision in a decentralized manner to optimize a global objective with restricted communication between neighbors over the network. We propose a hierarchically decentralized MARL method, \textit{LToS}, which enables agents to learn to dynamically share reward with neighbors so as to encourage agents to cooperate on the global objective. For each agent, the high-level policy learns how to share reward with neighbors to decompose the global objective, while the low-level policy learns to optimize local objective induced by the high-level policies in the neighborhood. The two policies form a bi-level optimization and learn alternately. We empirically demonstrate that LToS outperforms existing methods in both social dilemma and two networked MARL scenarios.

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