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Multiagent Q-learning with Sub-Team Coordination

Huang, W; Li, K; Shao, K; Zhou, T; Taylor, ME; Luo, J; Wang, D; ... Deng, X; + view all (2022) Multiagent Q-learning with Sub-Team Coordination. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. Green open access

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Abstract

In many real-world cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks, teams of agents can rehearse together before deployment, but then communication constraints may force individual agents to execute independently when deployed. Centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) is increasingly popular in recent years, focusing mainly on this setting. In the value-based MARL branch, credit assignment mechanism is typically used to factorize the team reward into each individual's reward - individual-global-max (IGM) is a condition on the factorization ensuring that agents' action choices coincide with team's optimal joint action. However, current architectures fail to consider local coordination within sub-teams that should be exploited for more effective factorization, leading to faster learning. We propose a novel value factorization framework, called multiagent Q-learning with sub-team coordination (QSCAN), to flexibly represent sub-team coordination while honoring the IGM condition. QSCAN encompasses the full spectrum of sub-team coordination according to sub-team size, ranging from the monotonic value function class to the entire IGM function class, with familiar methods such as QMIX and QPLEX located at the respective extremes of the spectrum. Experimental results show that QSCAN's performance dominates state-of-the-art methods in matrix games, predator-prey tasks, the Switch challenge in MA-Gym. Additionally, QSCAN achieves comparable performances to those methods in a selection of StarCraft II micro-management tasks.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Multiagent Q-learning with Sub-Team Coordination
Event: 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022)
ISBN-13: 9781713871088
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Publisher version: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2...
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10173243
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