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Title: Reward Design in Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Packet Routing

Paper content:
In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), how to design a suitable reward signal to accelerate learning and stabilize convergence is a critical problem.
The global reward signal assigns the same global reward to all agents without distinguishing their contributions, while the local reward signal provides different local rewards to each agent based solely on individual behavior.
Both of the two reward assignment approaches have some shortcomings: the former might encourage lazy agents, while the latter might produce selfish agents.
In this paper, we study reward design problem in cooperative MARL based on packet routing environments.
Firstly, we show that the above two reward signals are prone to produce suboptimal policies.
Then, inspired by some observations and considerations, we design some mixed reward signals, which are off-the-shelf to learn better policies.
Finally, we turn the mixed reward signals into the adaptive counterparts, which achieve best results in our experiments.
Other reward signals are also discussed in this paper.
As reward design is a very fundamental problem in RL and especially in MARL, we hope that MARL researchers can rethink the rewards used in their systems.
In reinforcement learning (RL), the goal of the agent is formalized in terms of a special signal, i.e., reward, coming from the environment.
The agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives in the long run.
Formally, we express this idea as the Reward Hypothesis BID31 : the goal of RL agent can be exactly described as the maximization of the expected value of the cumulative sum of a received scalar reward signal.It is thus critical that the rewards truly indicate what we want to accomplish.
One reward design principle is that the rewards must reflect what the goal is, instead of how to achieve the goal 1 .
For example, in AlphaGo , the agent is only rewarded for actually winning.
If we also reward the agent for achieving subgoals such as taking its opponent's pieces, the agent might find a way to achieve them even at the cost of losing the game.
A similar example of faulty reward function is provided by BID26 : if we reward the action of cleaning up dirt, the optimal policy causes the robot to repeatedly dump and clean up the same dirt.
In fact, the how reward encodes human experience, which is heuristic in some extent.
Based on the heuristic how reward, it is really easy to deviate from the ultimate goal.However, as BID35 point out, the exact what reward that encodes the performance objective might be awful to use as a training objective.
It will result in slow and unstable learning occasionally.
At the same time, a training objective that differs from the performance objective can still do well with respect to it.
For example, the Intrinsically Motivated Reinforcement Learning (IMRL) BID6 BID27 ) combines a domain-specific intrinsic reward with the reward coming from the environment to improve learning especially in sparse-reward domains.Although reward design problem in single-agent RL is relatively tractable, it becomes more thorny in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), as MARL is naturally more complex than singleagent RL.
As we know, the global reward and local reward have long been proved to be defective: the former might encourage lazy agents, while the latter might produce selfish agents.Inspired by the success of intrinsic reward in single-agent RL, we hypothesize that similar methods may be useful in MARL too.
Naturally, in this paper, we ask and try to answer a question:Can we formulate some special rewards (such as intrinsic reward) based on the meta what rewards to accelerate learning and stabilize convergence of MARL systems?
Specifically, in this paper, we propose several new MARL environments modified from the well known Packet Routing Domain.
In those environments, the goal is to figure out some good flow splitting policies for all routers (i.e., agents) to minimize the maximum link utilization ratio in the whole network.
We set the meta reward signals as 1 -max(U l ).
We argue that the meta reward signals are some kinds of what rewards because they tell the agents that we want to minimize max(U l ), i.e., minimize the maximum of all link utilization ratios.
For detailed discussions, we refer the readers to the proposed environments and rewards in Section 3 and 4.Based on those environments and the meta what rewards, we can focus on our reward design research purpose.
Specifically, we firstly show that both of the widely adopted global and local reward signals are prone to produce suboptimal policies.
Then, inspired by some observations and considerations, we design some mixed reward signals, which are off-the-shelf to learn better policies.
Finally, we turn the mixed reward signals into the adaptive counterparts, which achieve best results in our experiments.
Besides, we also discuss other reward signals in this paper.In summary, our contributions are two-fold.
(1) We propose some new MARL environments to advance the study of MARL.
As many applications in the real world can be modeled using similar methods, we expect that other fields can also benefit from this work.
(2) We propose and evaluate several reward signals in these MARL environments.
Our studies generalize the following thesis BID6 BID35 in single-agent RL to MARL: agents can learn better policies even when the training objective differs from the performance objective.
This remind us to be careful to design the rewards, as they are really important to guide the agent behavior.The rest of this paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 introduces background briefly, followed by the proposed environments and rewards in Section 3 and 4, respectively.
We then present the experiments and discussions in Section 5 and 6, respectively.
Section 7 concludes this work.
Why the convergence rate of Complex Topology is low?
In this paper, we only focus on designing special reward signals, rather than applying other sophisticated technologies, to solve the packet routing problem.
In fact, the convergence rate can be improved to almost 100% for all topologies if we combine the proposed rewards with other methods.
To make this paper easy to read, we do not introduce irrelevant methods.Can the proposed rewards generalize successfully in other environments?
In fact, not all environments can directly calculate the local reward or global reward, as BID24 point out.
In such environments, the proposed rewards might be only useful at high computation cost.
However, the calculation of the rewards is not the research purpose of this paper.
We argue that although the proposed rewards have limitations, they can be easily applied to many real-world applications such as internet packet routing and traffic flow allocation, as mentioned in Section 3.Can the designed rewards be seen as a kind of auxiliary task?
Yes, they are some auxiliary reward signals indeed.
But please note that the auxiliary reward signals are different from the auxiliary task used in UNREAL BID15 , where the auxiliary task is used for improving the feature extraction ability of neural networks, while our auxiliary reward signals directly guide the learned policies.
In fact, the mixed rewards are similar with VIME (Houthooft et al., 2016) as analyzed in Section 2.1.
And the adaptive rewards are similar with curriculum learning BID38 , as both of them train the agents progressively from easy to the final difficult environment.
In this paper, we study reward design problem in cooperative MARL based on packet routing environments.
Firstly, we show that both of the widely adopted global and local reward signals are prone to produce suboptimal policies.
Then, inspired by some observations and considerations, we design some mixed reward signals, which are off-the-shelf to learn better policies.
Finally, we turn the mixed reward signals into the adaptive counterparts, which achieve best results in our experiments.Our study generalizes the following thesis BID6 BID35 in singleagent RL to MARL: the training objective that differs from the performance objective can still do well with respect to it.
As reward design is a very fundamental problem in RL and especially in MARL, we hope that MARL researchers can rethink the rewards used in their systems.For future work, we would like to use Evolutionary Algorithm BID11 to search the best weight of local reward, and verify whether the learned weight has the same decay property.
We also expect to test the proposed reward signals in other application domains.
Real flow trajectories from the American Abilene Network are shown in FIG5 .
Note that we normalize the flow demands so that they can be consistent with link capacities.To test the learned policies, we randomly change the flow demands of each IE-pair.

assistant: text: We study reward design problem in cooperative MARL based on packet routing environments. The experimental results remind us to be careful to design the rewards, as they are really important to guide the agent behavior.