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Abstract - Low Variance Trust Region Optimization with Independent Actors and Sequential Updates in Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning assumes each agent shares the same reward function and can be trained effectively using the Trust Region framework of single-agent. Instead of relying on other agents' actions, the independent actors setting considers each agent to act based only on its local information, thus having more flexible applications. However, in the sequential update framework, it is required to re-estimate the joint advantage function after each individual agent's policy step. Despite the practical success of importance sampling, the updated advantage function suffers from exponentially high variance problems, which likely result in unstable convergence. In this work, we first analyze the high variance advantage both empirically and theoretically. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a clipping objective to control the upper bounds of the advantage fluctuation in sequential updates. With the proposed objective, we provide a monotonic bound with sub-linear convergence to $\epsilon$-Nash Equilibria. We further derive two new practical algorithms using our clipping objective. The experiment results on three popular multi-agent reinforcement learning benchmarks show that our proposed method outperforms the tested baselines in most environments. By carefully analyzing different training settings, our proposed method is highlighted with both stable convergence properties and the desired low advantage variance estimation. For reproducibility purposes, our source code is publicly available at this https URL.
低方差信任域优化:合作多智能体强化学习中的独立智能体与顺序更新 /
Low Variance Trust Region Optimization with Independent Actors and Sequential Updates in Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文提出一种新的裁剪目标函数,用于解决合作多智能体强化学习中,独立智能体顺序更新时优势函数估计方差过高的问题,从而在确保稳定收敛的同时,在多个基准任务上取得了优于现有方法的性能。