Cheap Talk Discovery and Utilization in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Yat Long Lo, Christian Schroeder de Witt, Samuel Sokota, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster, Shimon Whiteson

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: A novel problem formulation and methodology in MARL on learning where to communicate and where best to communicate.

Abstract: By enabling agents to communicate, recent cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods have demonstrated better task performance and more coordinated behavior. Most existing approaches facilitate inter-agent communication by allowing agents to send messages to each other through free communication channels, i.e., \emph{cheap talk channels}. Current methods require these channels to be constantly accessible and known to the agents a priori. In this work, we lift these requirements such that the agents must discover the cheap talk channels and learn how to use them. Hence, the problem has two main parts: \emph{cheap talk discovery} (CTD) and \emph{cheap talk utilization} (CTU). We introduce a novel conceptual framework for both parts and develop a new algorithm based on mutual information maximization that outperforms existing algorithms in CTD/CTU settings. We also release a novel benchmark suite to stimulate future research in CTD/CTU.

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