Learning Expensive Coordination: An Event-Based Deep RL Approach
Authors: Zhenyu Shi*, Runsheng Yu*, Xinrun Wang*, Rundong Wang, Youzhi Zhang, Hanjiang Lai, Bo An
Keywords: Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Leader–Follower Markov Game, Expensive Coordination
TL;DR: We propose an event-based policy gradient  to train the leader and an action abstraction policy gradient to train the followers in leader-follower Markov game.
Abstract: Existing works in deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) mainly focus on coordinating cooperative agents to complete certain tasks jointly. However, in many cases of the real world, agents are self-interested such as employees in a company and clubs in a league. Therefore, the leader, i.e., the manager of the company or the league, needs to provide bonuses to followers for efficient coordination, which we call expensive coordination. The main difficulties of expensive coordination are that i) the leader has to consider the long-term effect and predict the followers' behaviors when assigning bonuses and ii) the complex interactions between followers make the training process hard to converge, especially when the leader's policy changes with time. In this work, we address this problem through an event-based deep RL approach. Our main contributions are threefold. (1) We model the leader's decision-making process as a semi-Markov Decision Process and propose a novel multi-agent event-based policy gradient to learn the leader's long-term policy. (2) We exploit the leader-follower consistency scheme to design a follower-aware module and a follower-specific attention module to predict the followers' behaviors and make accurate response to their behaviors. (3) We propose an action abstraction-based policy gradient algorithm to reduce the followers' decision space and thus accelerate the training process of followers. Experiments in resource collections, navigation, and the predator-prey game reveal that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods dramatically.