Value-Decomposition Networks For Cooperative Multi-Agent Learning Based On Team Reward

Peter Sunehag, Guy Lever, Audrunas Gruslys, Wojciech Marian Czarnecki, Vinícius Flores Zambaldi, Max Jaderberg, Marc Lanctot, Nicolas Sonnerat, Joel Z. Leibo, Karl Tuyls, Thore Graepel

Abstract: We study the problem of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning with a single joint reward signal. This class of learning problems is difficult because of the often large combined action and observation spaces. In the fully centralized and decentralized approaches, we find the problem of spurious rewards and a phenomenon we call the "lazy agent'' problem, which arises due to partial observability. We address these problems by training individual agents with a novel value-decomposition network architecture, which learns to decompose the team value function into agent-wise value functions.