Asynchronous Multi-Agent Actor-Critic with Macro-Actions

Yuchen Xiao, Weihao Tan, Christopher Amato

Abstract: Many realistic multi-agent problems naturally require agents to be capable of performing asynchronously without waiting for other agents to terminate (e.g., multi-robot domains). Such problems can be modeled as Macro-Action Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (MacDec-POMDPs). Current policy gradient methods are not applicable to the asynchronous actions in MacDec-POMDPs, as these methods assume that agents synchronously reason about action selection at every time-step. To allow asynchronous learning and decision-making, we formulate a set of asynchronous multi-agent actor-critic methods that allow agents to directly optimize asynchronous (macro-action-based) policies in three standard training paradigms: decentralized learning, centralized learning, and centralized training for decentralized execution. Empirical results in various domains show high-quality solutions can be learned for large domains when using our methods.