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Title: Coordinated Exploration via Intrinsic Rewards for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Paper content:
Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning.
In the single-agent setting, this challenge has been addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of their state spaces.
Applying these techniques naively to the multi-agent setting results in agents exploring independently, without any coordination among themselves.
We argue that learning in cooperative multi-agent settings can be accelerated and improved if agents coordinate with respect to what they have explored.
In this paper we propose an approach for learning how to dynamically select between different types of intrinsic rewards which consider not just what an individual agent has explored, but all agents, such that the agents can coordinate their exploration and maximize extrinsic returns.
Concretely, we formulate the approach as a hierarchical policy where a high-level controller selects among sets of policies trained on different types of intrinsic rewards and the low-level controllers learn the action policies of all agents under these specific rewards.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a multi-agent gridworld domain with sparse rewards, and then show that our method scales up to more complex settings by evaluating on the VizDoom platform.
Recent work in deep reinforcement learning effectively tackles challenging problems including the board game Go , Atari video games (Mnih et al., 2015) , and simulated robotic continuous control (Lillicrap et al., 2016) ; however, these successful approaches often rely on frequent feedback indicating whether the learning agent is performing well, otherwise known as dense rewards.
In many tasks, dense rewards can be difficult to specify without inducing locally optimal but globally sub-optimal behavior.
As such, it is frequently desirable to specify only a sparse reward that simply signals whether an agent has attained success or failure on a given task.
Despite their desirability, sparse rewards introduce their own set of challenges.
When rewards are sparse, determining which of an agent's actions led to a reward becomes more difficult, a phenomenon known in reinforcement learning as the credit-assignment problem.
Furthermore, if rewards cannot be obtained by random actions, an agent will never receive a signal through which it can begin learning.
As such, researchers have devised methods which attempt to provide agents with additional reward signals, known as intrinsic rewards, through which they can learn meaningful behavior (Oudeyer & Kaplan, 2009) .
A large subset of these works focus on learning intrinsic rewards that encourage exploration of the state space (Pathak et al., 2017; Houthooft et al., 2016; Burda et al., 2019; Ostrovski et al., 2017; Tang et al., 2017) .
Exploring the state space provides a useful inductive bias for many sparse reward problems where the challenge lies in "finding" rewards that may only be obtained in parts of the state space that are hard to reach by random exploration.
These exploration-focused approaches frequently formulate their intrinsic rewards to measure the "novelty" of a state, such that agents are rewarded for taking actions that lead to novel states.
Our work approaches the question of how to apply novelty-based intrinsic motivation in the cooperative multi-agent setting.
Directly applying novelty-based intrinsic motivation to the multi-agent setting results in agents each exploring their shared state space independently from one another.
In many cases, independent exploration may not be the most efficient method.
For example, consider a task where multiple agents are placed in a maze and their goal is to collectively reach all of the landmarks that are spread out through the maze.
It would be inefficient for the agents to explore the same areas redundantly.
Instead, it would be much more sensible for agents to "divide-and-conquer," or avoid redundant exploration.
Thus, an ideal intrinsic reward for this task would encourage such behavior; however, the same behavior would not be ideal for other tasks.
For example, take the same maze but change the task such that all agents need to reach the same landmark.
Divide-and-conquer would no longer be an optimal exploration strategy since agents only need to find one landmark and they all need to reach the same one.
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning can benefit from sharing information about exploration across agents; however, the question of what to do with that shared information depends on the task at hand.
In order to improve exploration in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, we must first identify what kinds inductive biases can potentially be useful for multi-agent tasks and then devise intrinsic reward functions that incorporate those biases.
Then, we must find a way to allow our agents to adapt their exploration to the given task, rather than committing to one type of intrinsic reward function.
In this work, we first introduce a candidate set of intrinsic rewards for multiagent exploration which hold differing properties with regards to how they explore the state space.
Subsequently, we present a hierarchical method for simultaneously learning policies trained on different intrinsic rewards and selecting the policies which maximize extrinsic returns.
Importantly, all policies are trained using a shared replay buffer, drastically improving the sample efficiency and effectiveness of learning in cooperative multi-agent tasks with sparse rewards.
We propose a set of multi-agent intrinsic reward functions with differing properties, and compare them both qualitatively (through videos) and quantitatively on several multi-agent exploration tasks in both a gridworld domain as well as in VizDoom.
Overall, we can see that cooperative multi-agent tasks can, in many cases, benefit from intrinsic rewards that take into account what other agents have explored, but there are various ways to incorporate that information, each with differing properties.
As such, we propose a method for learning policies for all intrinsic reward types simultaneously while dynamically selecting the most effective ones.
We show that our method is capable of matching or surpassing the performance of the best performing intrinsic reward type on various tasks while using the same number of samples collected from the environment.
In future work we hope to introduce methods for directly learning the multi-agent intrinsic reward functions, rather than selecting from a set.
The black holes which send agents back to their starting positions if they are stepped into are an important aspect of the environment, as they add difficulty to exploration.
The probability, ρ, of a black hole opening at each step, t, evolves as such: ρ t+1 = ρ t + N (µ, σ), where µ = σ = 0.05 for TASK 1 and µ = σ = 0.005 for 2 and 3.
Agents observe their global position in (x, y) coordinates (scalars), as well as local information regarding walls in adjacent spaces, the probability of their adjacent spaces opening into a black hole, the relative position of other agents (if they are within 3 spaces), as well as information about which treasures the agent has already collected in the given episode.
The global state is represented by the (x, y) coordinates of all agents, as one-hot encoded vectors for x and y separately, as well as the local information of all agents regarding black holes, walls, and treasures collected.
Each agent's action space consists of the 4 cardinal directions as well as an option to not move, which is helpful in cases where an agent is waiting for a black hole to be safe to cross.

assistant: text: We propose several intrinsic reward functions for encouraging coordinated exploration in multi-agent problems, and introduce an approach to dynamically selecting the best exploration method for a given task, online.