N$\text{A}^{\text{2}}$Q: Neural Attention Additive Model for Interpretable Multi-Agent Q-Learning
Authors: Zichuan Liu, Yuanyang Zhu, Chunlin Chen

Value decomposition is widely used in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, however, its implicit credit assignment mechanism is not yet fully understood due to black-box networks. In this work, we study an interpretable value decomposition framework via the family of generalized additive models. We present a novel method, named Neural Attention Additive Q-learning (N$\text{A}^\text{2}$Q), providing inherent intelligibility of collaboration behavior. N$\text{A}^\text{2}$Q can explicitly factorize the optimal joint policy induced by enriching shape functions to model all possible coalition of agents into individual policies. Moreover, we construct the identity semantics to promote estimating credits together with the global state and individual value functions, where local semantic masks help us diagnose whether each agent captures the relevant-task information. Extensive experiments show that N$\text{A}^\text{2}$Q consistently achieves superior performance compared to different state-of-the-art methods on all challenging tasks, while yielding human-like interpretability.