Learning when to communicate and doing that effectively is essential in multi-agent tasks. Recent works show that continuous communication allows efficient training with back-propagation in multiagent scenarios, but have been restricted to fullycooperative tasks. In this paper, we present Individualized Controlled Continuous Communication Model (IC3Net) which has better training efficiency than simple continuous communication model, and can be applied to semi-cooperative and competitive settings along with the cooperative settings. IC3Net controls continuous communication with a gating mechanism and uses individualized rewards for each agent to gain better performance and scalability while fixing credit assignment issues. Using variety of tasks including StarCraft BroodWars TM explore and combat scenarios, we show that our network yields improved performance and convergence rates than the baselines as the scale increases. Our results convey that IC3Net agents learn when to communicate based on the scenario and profitability.
REF proposed the individualized controlled continuous communication model, which is an extension of CommNet in competitive setting.
Learning when to Communicate at Scale in Multiagent Cooperative and Competitive Tasks
ArXiv
ArXiv
Mathematics Computer Science