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Title: SSoC: Learning Spontaneous and Self-Organizing Communication for Multi-Agent Collaboration

Paper content:
Multi-agent collaboration is required by numerous real-world problems.
Although distributed setting is usually adopted by practical systems, local range communication and information aggregation still matter in fulfilling complex tasks.
For multi-agent reinforcement learning, many previous studies have been dedicated to design an effective communication architecture.
However, existing models usually suffer from an ossified communication structure, e.g., most of them predefine a particular communication mode by specifying a fixed time frequency and spatial scope for agents to communicate regardless of necessity.
Such design is incapable of dealing with multi-agent scenarios that are capricious and complicated, especially when only partial information is available.
Motivated by this, we argue that the solution is to build a spontaneous and self-organizing communication (SSoC) learning scheme.
By treating the communication behaviour as an explicit action, SSoC learns to organize communication in an effective and efficient way.
Particularly, it enables each agent to spontaneously decide when and who to send messages based on its observed states.
In this way, a dynamic inter-agent communication channel is established in an online and self-organizing manner.
The agents also learn how to adaptively aggregate the received messages and its own hidden states to execute actions.
Various experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that SSoC really learns intelligent message passing among agents located far apart.
With such agile communications, we observe that effective collaboration tactics emerge which have not been mastered by the compared baselines.
Many real-world applications involve participation of multiple agents, for example, multi-robot control BID12 , network packet delivery BID20 and autonomous vehicles planning BID0 , etc..
Learning such systems is ideally required to be autonomous (e.g., using reinforcement learning).
Recently, with the rise of deep learning, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated many exciting results in several challenging scenarios e.g. robotic manipulation BID3 [10], visual navigation BID22 BID10 , as well as the well-known application in game playing BID13 [17] etc..
However, unlike its success in solving single-agent tasks, deep RL still faces many challenges in solving multi-agent learning scenarios.Modeling multiple agents has two extreme solutions: one is treating all agents as an unity to apply a single centralized framework, the other is modelling the agents as completely independent learners.
Studies following the former design are often known as "centralized approach", for example BID18 BID14 etc.
The obvious advantage of this class of approaches is a good guarantee of optimality since it is equivalent to the single agent Markov decision process (MDP) essentially.
However, it is usually unfeasible to assume a global controller that knows everything about the environment in practice.
The other class of methods can be marked as "independent multi-agent reinforcement learning".
These approaches assumes a totally independent setting in which the agents treat all others as a part of the observed environment.
BID2 has pointed out that such a setup will suffer from the problem of non-stationarity, which renders it hard to learn an optimal joint policy.In essence, there are three key factors that determine a communication.
That is when, where and how the participants initiate the communication.
Most of existing approaches, including the abovementioned Meanfield and Commnet, try to predefine each ingredient and thus lead to an inflexible communication architecture.
Recently, VAIN BID4 and ATOC BID6 incorporate attentional communication for collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning.
Compared with Meanfield and Commnet, VAIN and ATOC have made one step further towards more flexible communication.
However, the step is still limited.
Take ATOC as an example, although it learns a dynamic attention to diversify agent messages, the message flow is only limited to the local range.
This is unfavorable for learning complex and long range communications.
The communication time is also specified manually (every ten steps).
Hence it is requisite to find a new method that allows more flexible communication on both learnable time and scopes.In this regard, we propose a new solution with learnable spontaneous communication behaviours and self-organizing message flow among agents.
The proposed architecture is named as "Spontaneous and Self-Organizing Communication" (SSoC) network.
The key to such a spontaneous communication lies in the design that the communication is treated as an action to be learned in a reinforcement manner.
The corresponding action is called "Speak".
Each agent is eligible to take such an action based on its current observation.
Once an agent decides to "Speak", it sends a message to partners within the communication scope.
In the next step, agents receiving this message will decide whether to pass the message forward to more distant agents or keep silence.
This is exactly how SSoC distinguishes itself from existing approaches.
Instead of predestining when and who will participate in the communication, SSoC agents start communication only when necessary and stop transferring received messages if they are useless.
A self-organizing communication policy is learned via maximizing the total collaborative reward.
The communication process of SSoC is depicted in Fig.1 .
It shows an example of the message flow among four communicating agents.
Specifically, agent 3 sends a message to ask for help for remote partners.
Due to agent 3's communication range, the message can be seen only by agent 1.
Then agent 1 decides to transfer the collected message to its neighbors.
Finally agent 2 and agent 4 read the messages from agent 3.
These two agents are directly unreachable from agent 3.
In this way, each agent learns to send or transfer messages spontaneously and finally form a communication route.
Compared with the communication channels predefined in previous works, the communication here is dynamically changing according to real needs of the participating agents.
Hence the communication manner forms a self-organizing mechanism.We instantiate SSoC with a policy network with four functional units as shown in FIG0 .
Besides the agent's original action, an extra "Speak" action is output based on the current observation and hidden states.
Here we simply design "Speak" as a binary {0, 1} output.
Hence it works as a "switch" to control whether to send or transfer a message.
The "Speak" action determines when and who to communicate in a fully spontaneous manner.
A communication structure will naturally emerge after several steps of message propagation.
Here in our SSoC method, the "Speak" policy is learned by a reward-driven reinforcement learning algorithm.
The assumption is that a better message propagation strategy should also lead to a higher accumulated reward.We evaluate SSoC on several representative benchmarks.
As we have observed, the learned policy does demonstrate novel clear message propagation patterns which enable complex collaborative strategies, for example, remote partners can be requested to help the current agent to get over hard times.
We also show the high efficiency of communication by visualizing a heat map showing how often the agents "speak".
The communication turns out to be much sparser than existing predefined communication channels which produce excessive messages.
With such emerged collaborations enabled by SSoC's intelligent communication manner, it is also expected to see clear performance gains compared with existing methods on the tested tasks.
In this paper, we propose a SSoC network for MARL tasks.
Unlike previous methods which often assume a predestined communication structure, the SSoC agent learns when to start a communication or transfer its received message via a novel "Speak" action.
Similar to the agent's original action, this "Speak" can also be learned in a reinforcement manner.
With such a spontaneous communication action, SSoC is able to establish a dynamic self-organizing communication structure according to the current state.
Experiments have been performed to demonstrate better collaborative policies and improved on communication efficiency brought by such a design.
In future work, we will continue to enhance the learning of "Speak" action e.g. encoding a temporal abstraction to make the communication flow more stable or develop a specific reward for this "Speak" action.

assistant: text: This paper proposes a spontaneous and self-organizing communication (SSoC) learning scheme for multi-agent RL tasks.