A General Formulation of Independent Policy Optimization in Fully Decentralized MARL

22 Sept 2023 (modified: 25 Mar 2024)ICLR 2024 Conference Withdrawn SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Keywords: multi-agent, reinforcement learning, policy optimization, decentralized learning
Abstract: Independent learning is a straightforward solution for fully decentralized learning in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). The study of independent learning has a history of decades, and the representatives, such as independent Q-learning and independent PPO, can obtain good performance in some benchmarks. However, most independent learning algorithms are without convergence guarantees or theoretical support. In this paper, we propose a general formulation of independent policy optimization, $f$-divergence policy optimization. We show the generality of such a formulation and discuss the limitation. Based on this formulation, we further propose a novel independent learning algorithm, TVPO, that theoretically guarantees convergence. Empirically, we show that TVPO outperforms state-of-the-art fully decentralized learning methods in three popular cooperative MARL benchmarks, which verifies the efficacy of TVPO.
Primary Area: reinforcement learning
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Submission Number: 4915
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