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Title: Promoting Coordination through Policy Regularization in Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

Paper content:
A central challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning is the induction of coordination between agents of a team.
In this work, we investigate how to promote inter-agent coordination using policy regularization and discuss two possible avenues respectively based on inter-agent modelling and synchronized sub-policy selection.
We test each approach in four challenging continuous control tasks with sparse rewards and compare them against three baselines including MADDPG, a state-of-the-art multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm.
To ensure a fair comparison, we rely on a thorough hyper-parameter selection and training methodology that allows a fixed hyper-parameter search budget for each algorithm and environment.
We consequently assess both the hyper-parameter sensitivity, sample-efficiency and asymptotic performance of each learning method.
Our experiments show that the proposed methods lead to significant improvements on cooperative problems.
We further analyse the effects of the proposed regularizations on the behaviors learned by the agents.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) refers to the task of training an agent to maximize its expected return by interacting with an environment that contains other learning agents.
It represents a challenging branch of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with interesting developments in recent years (Hernandez-Leal et al., 2018) .
A popular framework for MARL is the use of a Centralized Training and a Decentralized Execution (CTDE) procedure (Lowe et al., 2017; Iqbal & Sha, 2019; Foerster et al., 2019; Rashid et al., 2018) .
It is typically implemented by training critics that approximate the value of the joint observations and actions, which are used to train actors restricted to the observation of a single agent.
Such critics, if exposed to coordinated joint actions leading to high returns, can steer the agents' policies toward these highly rewarding behaviors.
However, these approaches depend on the agents luckily stumbling on these actions in order to grasp their benefit.
Thus, it might fail in scenarios where coordination is unlikely to occur by chance.
We hypothesize that in such scenarios, coordination-promoting inductive biases on the policy search could help discover coordinated behaviors more efficiently and supersede task-specific reward shaping and curriculum learning.
In this work, we explore two different priors for successful coordination and use these to regularize the learned policies.
The first avenue, TeamReg, assumes that an agent must be able to predict the behavior of its teammates in order to coordinate with them.
The second, CoachReg, supposes that coordinating agents individually recognize different situations and synchronously use different subpolicies to react to them.
In the following sections we show how to derive practical regularization terms from these premises and meticulously evaluate them 1 .
Our contributions are twofold.
First, we propose two novel approaches that aim at promoting coordination in multi-agent systems.
Our methods augment CTDE MARL algorithms with additional multi-agent objectives that act as regularizers and are optimized jointly with the main return-maximization objective.
Second, we design two new sparse-reward cooperative tasks in the multi-agent particle environment (Mordatch & Abbeel, 2018) .
We use them along with two standard multi-agent tasks to present a detailed evaluation of our approaches against three different baselines.
Finally, we validate our methods' key components by performing an ablation study.
Our experiments suggest that our TeamReg objective provides a dense learning signal that helps to guide the policy towards coordination in the absence of external reward, eventually leading it to the discovery of high performing team strategies in a number of cooperative tasks.
Similarly, by enforcing synchronous sub-policy selections, CoachReg enables to fine-tune a sub-behavior for each recognized situation yielding significant improvements on the overall performance.
The proposed methods offer a way to incorporate new inductive biases in CTDE multi-agent policy search algorithms.
In this work, we evaluate them by extending MADDPG, a state of the art algorithm widely used in the MARL litterature.
We compare against vanilla MADDPG as well as two of its variations in the four cooperative multi-agent tasks described in Section 5.
The first variation (DDPG) is the single-agent counterpart of MADDPG (decentralized training).
The second (MADDPG + sharing) shares the policy and value-function models across agents.
To offer a fair comparison between all methods, the hyper-parameter search routine is the same for each algorithm and environment (see Appendix D.1).
For each search-experiment (one per algorithm per environment), 50 randomly sampled hyper-parameter configurations each using 3 training seeds (total of 150 runs) are used to train the models for 15, 000 episodes.
For each algorithm-environment pair, we then select the best hyper-parameter configuration for the final comparison and retrain them on 10 seeds for twice as long.
We give more details about the training setup and model selection in Appendix B and D.2.
The results of the hyperparameter searches are given in Appendix D.5.
In this work we introduced two policy regularization methods to promote multi-agent coordination within the CTDE framework: TeamReg, which is based on inter-agent action predictability and CoachReg that relies on synchronized behavior selection.
A thorough empirical evaluation of these methods showed that they significantly improve asymptotic performances on cooperative multiagent tasks.
Interesting avenues for future work would be to study the proposed regularizations on other policy search methods as well as to combine both incentives and investigate how the two coordinating objectives interact.
Finally, a limitation of the current formulation is that it relies on single-step metrics, which simplifies off-policy learning but also limits the longer-term coordination opportunities.
A promising direction is thus to explore model-based planning approaches to promote long-term multi-agent interactions.
A TASKS DESCRIPTIONS SPREAD (Figure 3a ): In this environment, there are 3 agents (small orange circles) and 3 landmarks (bigger gray circles).
At every timestep, agents receive a team-reward r t = n − c where n is the number of landmarks occupied by at least one agent and c the number of collisions occurring at that timestep.
To maximize their return, agents must therefore spread out and cover all landmarks.
Initial agents' and landmarks' positions are random.
Termination is triggered when the maximum number of timesteps is reached.
BOUNCE (Figure 3b ): In this environment, two agents (small orange circles) are linked together with a spring that pulls them toward each other when stretched above its relaxation length.
At episode's mid-time a ball (smaller black circle) falls from the top of the environment.
Agents must position correctly so as to have the ball bounce on the spring towards the target (bigger beige circle), which turns yellow if the ball's bouncing trajectory passes through it.
They receive a team-reward of r t = 0.1 if the ball reflects towards the side walls, r t = 0.2 if the ball reflects towards the top of the environment, and r t = 10 if the ball reflects towards the target.
At initialisation, the target's and ball's vertical position is fixed, their horizontal positions are random.
Agents' initial positions are also random.
Termination is triggered when the ball is bounced by the agents or when the maximum number of timesteps is reached.
COMPROMISE (Figure 3c ): In this environment, two agents (small orange circles) are linked together with a spring that pulls them toward each other when stretched above its relaxation length.
They both have a distinct assigned landmark (light gray circle for light orange agent, dark gray circle for dark orange agent), and receive a reward of r t = 10 when they reach it.
Once a landmark is reached by its corresponding agent, the landmark is randomly relocated in the environment.
Initial positions of agents and landmark are random.
Termination is triggered when the maximum number of timesteps is reached.
CHASE (Figure 3d ): In this environment, two predators (orange circles) are chasing a prey (turquoise circle).
The prey moves with respect to a scripted policy consisting of repulsion forces from the walls and predators.
At each timestep, the learning agents (predators) receive a teamreward of r t = n where n is the number of predators touching the prey.
The prey has a greater max speed and acceleration than the predators.
Therefore, to maximize their return, the two agents must coordinate in order to squeeze the prey into a corner or a wall and effectively trap it there.
Termination is triggered when the maximum number of time steps is reached.

assistant: text: This paper proposes two methods of biasing agents towards learning coordinated behaviours and evaluates both rigorously across multi-agent domains of suitable complexity.