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arXiv · 2205.10607

Coordinating Policies Among Multiple Agents via an Intelligent Communication Channel

Dianbo Liu·Vedant Shah·Oussama Boussif·Cristian Meo·Anirudh Goyal·Tianmin Shu·Michael Mozer·Nicolas Heess·Yoshua Bengio
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Abstract

In Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), specialized channels are often introduced that allow agents to communicate directly with one another. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach whereby agents communicate through an intelligent facilitator that learns to sift through and interpret signals provided by all agents to improve the agents' collective performance. To ensure that this facilitator does not become a centralized controller, agents are incentivized to reduce their dependence on the messages it conveys, and the messages can only influence the selection of a policy from a fixed set, not instantaneous actions given the policy. We demonstrate the strength of this architecture over existing baselines on several cooperative MARL environments.

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Dianbo Liu, Vedant Shah, Oussama Boussif, Cristian Meo, Anirudh Goyal, Tianmin Shu, Michael Mozer, Nicolas Heess, Yoshua Bengio. 2022-05-25. Coordinating Policies Among Multiple Agents via an Intelligent Communication Channel. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10607

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