Disentangling Successor Features for Coordination in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Seung Hyun Kim, Neale Van Stralen, Girish Chowdhary, Huy T. Tran

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a promising framework for solving complex tasks with many agents. However, a key challenge in MARL is defining private utility functions that ensure coordination when training decentralized agents. This challenge is especially prevalent in unstructured tasks with sparse rewards and many agents. We show that successor features can help address this challenge by disentangling an individual agent's impact on the global value function from that of all other agents. We use this disentanglement to compactly represent private utilities that support stable training of decentralized agents in unstructured tasks. We implement our approach using a centralized training, decentralized execution architecture and test it in a variety of multi-agent environments. Our results show improved performance and training time relative to existing methods and suggest that disentanglement of successor features offers a promising approach to coordination in MARL.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationInternational Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2022
PublisherInternational Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)
Pages751-760
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781713854333
StatePublished - 2022
Event21st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2022 - Auckland, Virtual, New Zealand
Duration: May 9 2022May 13 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
Volume2
ISSN (Print)1548-8403
ISSN (Electronic)1558-2914

Conference

Conference21st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2022
Country/TerritoryNew Zealand
CityAuckland, Virtual
Period5/9/225/13/22

Keywords

  • Coordination
  • Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering

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