Comparative Evaluation of Multiagent Learning Algorithms in a Diverse Set of Ad Hoc Team Problems
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Stefano V. Albrecht, Subramanian Ramamoorthy
备注：
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2012. This arXiv version of the original paper published in AAMAS 2012 uses an expanded title to spell out "MAL", and is otherwise identical
This paper is concerned with evaluating different multiagent learning (MAL) algorithms in problems where individual agents may be heterogenous, in the sense of utilizing different learning strategies, without the opportunity for prior agreements or information regarding coordination. Such a situation arises in ad hoc team problems, a model of many practical multiagent systems applications. Prior work in multiagent learning has often been focussed on homogeneous groups of agents, meaning that all agents were identical and a priori aware of this fact. Also, those algorithms that are specifically designed for ad hoc team problems are typically evaluated in teams of agents with fixed behaviours, as opposed to agents which are adapting their behaviours. In this work, we empirically evaluate five MAL algorithms, representing major approaches to multiagent learning but originally developed with the homogeneous setting in mind, to understand their behaviour in a set of ad hoc team problems. All teams consist of agents which are continuously adapting their behaviours. The algorithms are evaluated with respect to a comprehensive characterisation of repeated matrix games, using performance criteria that include considerations such as attainment of equilibrium, social welfare and fairness. Our main conclusion is that there is no clear winner. However, the comparative evaluation also highlights the relative strengths of different algorithms with respect to the type of performance criteria, e.g., social welfare vs. attainment of equilibrium.
Chicago Blackhawks（芝加哥黑鹰队）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
This paper draws correlations between several challenges and opportunities within the area of team sports analytics and key research areas within multiagent systems (MAS). We specifically consider invasion games, defined as sports where players invade the opposing team's territory and can interact anywhere on a playing surface such as ice hockey, soccer, and basketball. We argue that MAS is well-equipped to study invasion games and will benefit both MAS and sports analytics fields. Our discussion highlights areas for MAS implementation and further development along two axes: short-term in-game…
Metropolitan-United Faculty (FMU)（大都会联合学院）；Federal University of ABC (UFABC)（ABC联邦大学）
The social network analysis (SNA), branch of complex systems can be used in the construction of multiagent systems. This paper proposes a study of how social network analysis can assist in modeling multiagent systems, while addressing similarities and differences between the two theories. We built a prototype of multi-agent systems for resolution of tasks through the formation of teams of agents that are formed on the basis of the social network established between agents. Agents make use of performance indicators to assess when should change their social network to maximize the participation …
Despite the significant progress in multiagent teamwork, existing research does not address the optimality of its prescriptions nor the complexity of the teamwork problem. Without a characterization of the optimality-complexity tradeoffs, it is impossible to determine whether the assumptions and approximations made by a particular theory gain enough efficiency to justify the losses in overall performance. To provide a tool for use by multiagent researchers in evaluating this tradeoff, we present a unified framework, the COMmunicative Multiagent Team Decision Problem (COM-MTDP). The COM-MTDP mo…
The ad hoc coordination problem is to design an autonomous agent which is able to achieve optimal flexibility and efficiency in a multiagent system with no mechanisms for prior coordination. We conceptualise this problem formally using a game-theoretic model, called the stochastic Bayesian game, in which the behaviour of a player is determined by its private information, or type. Based on this model, we derive a solution, called Harsanyi-Bellman Ad Hoc Coordination (HBA), which utilises the concept of Bayesian Nash equilibrium in a planning procedure to find optimal actions in the sense of Bel…
The University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Privacy-aware multiagent systems must protect agents' sensitive data while simultaneously ensuring that agents accomplish their shared objectives. Towards this goal, we propose a framework to privatize inter-agent communications in cooperative multiagent decision-making problems. We study sequential decision-making problems formulated as cooperative Markov games with reach-avoid objectives. We apply a differential privacy mechanism to privatize agents' communicated symbolic state trajectories, and then we analyze tradeoffs between the strength of privacy and the team's performance. For a given…
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Advances in ad hoc teamwork have the potential to create agents that collaborate robustly in real-world applications. Agents deployed in the real world, however, are vulnerable to adversaries with the intent to subvert them. There has been little research in ad hoc teamwork that assumes the presence of adversaries. We explain the importance of extending ad hoc teamwork to include the presence of adversaries and clarify why this problem is difficult. We then propose some directions for new research opportunities in ad hoc teamwork that leads to more robust multi-agent cyber-physical infrastruct…
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Teesside University（提赛德大学）；Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）
Planning for ad hoc teamwork is challenging because it involves agents collaborating without any prior coordination or communication. The focus is on principled methods for a single agent to cooperate with others. This motivates investigating the ad hoc teamwork problem in the context of individual decision making frameworks. However, individual decision making in multiagent settings faces the task of having to reason about other agents' actions, which in turn involves reasoning about others. An established approximation that operationalizes this approach is to bound the infinite nesting from …
We present an architecture for ad hoc teamwork, which refers to collaboration in a team of agents without prior coordination. State of the art methods for this problem often include a data-driven component that uses a long history of prior observations to model the behaviour of other agents (or agent types) and to determine the ad hoc agent's behaviour. In many practical domains, it is challenging to find large training datasets, and necessary to understand and incrementally extend the existing models to account for changes in team composition or domain attributes. Our architecture combines th…
Learning Heterogeneous Agent Cooperation via Multiagent League Training
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
There are several real-world tasks that would benefit from applying multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms, including the coordination among self-driving cars. The real world has challenging conditions for multiagent learning systems, such as its partial observable and nonstationary nature. Moreover, if agents must share a limited resource (e.g. network bandwidth) they must all learn how to coordinate resource use. This paper introduces a deep recurrent multiagent actor-critic framework (R-MADDPG) for handling multiagent coordination under partial observable set-tings and limited …
Neural MMO is a computationally accessible research platform that combines large agent populations, long time horizons, open-ended tasks, and modular game systems. Existing environments feature subsets of these properties, but Neural MMO is the first to combine them all. We present Neural MMO as free and open source software with active support, ongoing development, documentation, and additional training, logging, and visualization tools to help users adapt to this new setting. Initial baselines on the platform demonstrate that agents trained in large populations explore more and learn a progr…
Whether in groups of humans or groups of computer agents, collaboration is most effective between individuals who have the ability to coordinate on a joint strategy for collective action. However, in general a rational actor will only intend to coordinate if that actor believes the other group members have the same intention. This circular dependence makes rational coordination difficult in uncertain environments if communication between actors is unreliable and no prior agreements have been made. An important normative question with regard to coordination in these ad hoc settings is therefore…
Multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms (MARL) have been demonstrated on complex tasks that require the coordination of a team of multiple agents to complete. Existing works have focused on sharing information between agents via centralized critics to stabilize learning or through communication to increase performance, but do not generally look at how information can be shared between agents to address the curse of dimensionality in MARL. We posit that a multiagent problem can be decomposed into a multi-task problem where each agent explores a subset of the state space instead of explorin…
We propose the novel few-shot teamwork (FST) problem, where skilled agents trained in a team to complete one task are combined with skilled agents from different tasks, and together must learn to adapt to an unseen but related task. We discuss how the FST problem can be seen as addressing two separate problems: one of reducing the experience required to train a team of agents to complete a complex task; and one of collaborating with unfamiliar teammates to complete a new task. Progress towards solving FST could lead to progress in both multi-agent reinforcement learning and ad hoc teamwork.
Estimating counterfactual treatment outcomes over time in complex multiagent scenarios
Graduate School of Informatics at Nagoya University（名古屋大学信息学研究科）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；Graduate School of Informatics at Kyoto University（京都大学信息学研究科）；Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo（东京大学工学研究科）；Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at Osaka University（大阪大学信息科学与技术研究科）
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Many artificial intelligence (AI) applications often require multiple intelligent agents to work in a collaborative effort. Efficient learning for intra-agent communication and coordination is an indispensable step towards general AI. In this paper, we take StarCraft combat game as a case study, where the task is to coordinate multiple agents as a team to defeat their enemies. To maintain a scalable yet effective communication protocol, we introduce a Multiagent Bidirectionally-Coordinated Network (BiCNet ['bIknet]) with a vectorised extension of actor-critic formulation. We show that BiCNet c…
MIT-LIDS（麻省理工学院信息与决策系统实验室）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Collective learning can be greatly enhanced when agents effectively exchange knowledge with their peers. In particular, recent work studying agents that learn to teach other teammates has demonstrated that action advising accelerates team-wide learning. However, the prior work has simplified the learning of advising policies by using simple function approximations and only considered advising with primitive (low-level) actions, limiting the scalability of learning and teaching to complex domains. This paper introduces a novel learning-to-teach framework, called hierarchical multiagent teaching…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Ben-Gurion University（本-古里安大学）
In order to generate plans for agents with multiple actuators, agent teams, or distributed controllers, we must be able to represent and plan using concurrent actions with interacting effects. This has historically been considered a challenging task requiring a temporal planner with the ability to reason explicitly about time. We show that with simple modifications, the STRIPS action representation language can be used to represent interacting actions. Moreover, algorithms for partial-order planning require only small modifications in order to be applied in such multiagent domains. We demonstr…
Many current large-scale multiagent team implementations can be characterized as following the belief-desire-intention (BDI) paradigm, with explicit representation of team plans. Despite their promise, current BDI team approaches lack tools for quantitative performance analysis under uncertainty. Distributed partially observable Markov decision problems (POMDPs) are well suited for such analysis, but the complexity of finding optimal policies in such models is highly intractable. The key contribution of this article is a hybrid BDI-POMDP approach, where BDI team plans are exploited to improve …
Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute (ANITI)（图卢兹人工与自然智能研究所）；University of Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；ISAE-Supaero（法国高等航空航天学院）；Andalusian Research Institute in Data Science and Computational Intelligence (DaSCI)（安达卢西亚数据科学与计算智能研究所）；Research Center for Information and Communications Technologies of the University of Granada (CITIC-UGR)（格拉纳达大学信息与通信技术研究中心）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）
A quantitative assessment of the global importance of an agent in a team is as valuable as gold for strategists, decision-makers, and sports coaches. Yet, retrieving this information is not trivial since in a cooperative task it is hard to isolate the performance of an individual from the one of the whole team. Moreover, it is not always clear the relationship between the role of an agent and his personal attributes. In this work we conceive an application of the Shapley analysis for studying the contribution of both agent policies and attributes, putting them on equal footing. Since the compu…
Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）
Many cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning environments provide agents with a sparse team-based reward, as well as a dense agent-specific reward that incentivizes learning basic skills. Training policies solely on the team-based reward is often difficult due to its sparsity. Furthermore, relying solely on the agent-specific reward is sub-optimal because it usually does not capture the team coordination objective. A common approach is to use reward shaping to construct a proxy reward by combining the individual rewards. However, this requires manual tuning for each environment. We intro…
Generalizable Agent Modeling for Agent Collaboration-Competition Adaptation with Multi-Retrieval and Dynamic Generation
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Bar Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；The University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Sony AI（索尼人工智能）
Ad hoc teamwork is the research problem of designing agents that can collaborate with new teammates without prior coordination. This survey makes a two-fold contribution: First, it provides a structured description of the different facets of the ad hoc teamwork problem. Second, it discusses the progress that has been made in the field so far, and identifies the immediate and long-term open problems that need to be addressed in ad hoc teamwork.
Information sharing is key in building team cognition and enables coordination and cooperation. High-performing human teams also benefit from acting strategically with hierarchical levels of iterated communication and rationalizability, meaning a human agent can reason about the actions of their teammates in their decision-making. Yet, the majority of prior work in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) does not support iterated rationalizability and only encourage inter-agent communication, resulting in a suboptimal equilibrium cooperation strategy. In this work, we show that reformulating…
Effective understanding of dynamically evolving multiagent interactions is crucial to capturing the underlying behavior of agents in social systems. It is usually challenging to observe these interactions directly, and therefore modeling the latent interactions is essential for realizing the complex behaviors. Recent work on Dynamic Neural Relational Inference (DNRI) captures explicit inter-agent interactions at every step. However, prediction at every step results in noisy interactions and lacks intrinsic interpretability without post-hoc inspection. Moreover, it requires access to ground tru…
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Collective human knowledge has clearly benefited from the fact that innovations by individuals are taught to others through communication. Similar to human social groups, agents in distributed learning systems would likely benefit from communication to share knowledge and teach skills. The problem of teaching to improve agent learning has been investigated by prior works, but these approaches make assumptions that prevent application of teaching to general multiagent problems, or require domain expertise for problems they can apply to. This learning to teach problem has inherent complexities r…
ROTATE: Regret-driven Open-ended Training for Ad Hoc Teamwork
Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；College of Computing and Data Science（计算与数据科学学院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
While research in ad hoc teamwork has great potential for solving real-world robotic applications, most developments so far have been focusing on environments with simple dynamics. In this article, we discuss how the problem of ad hoc teamwork can be of special interest for marine robotics and how it can aid marine operations. Particularly, we present a set of challenges that need to be addressed for achieving ad hoc teamwork in underwater environments and we discuss possible solutions based on current state-of-the-art developments in the ad hoc teamwork literature.
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Unveristy of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) have achieved super-human performance in games like Quake 3 and Dota 2. Unfortunately, these techniques require orders-of-magnitude more training rounds than humans and don't generalize to new agent configurations even on the same game. In this work, we propose Collaborative Q-learning (CollaQ) that achieves state-of-the-art performance in the StarCraft multi-agent challenge and supports ad hoc team play. We first formulate multi-agent collaboration as a joint optimization on reward assignment and show that each agent has an approxim…
INESC-ID（INESC-ID 研究所）；Instituto Superior Técnico（里斯本高等理工学院）
In this paper, we present a novel Bayesian online prediction algorithm for the problem setting of ad hoc teamwork under partial observability (ATPO), which enables on-the-fly collaboration with unknown teammates performing an unknown task without needing a pre-coordination protocol. Unlike previous works that assume a fully observable state of the environment, ATPO accommodates partial observability, using the agent's observations to identify which task is being performed by the teammates. Our approach assumes neither that the teammate's actions are visible nor an environment reward signal. We…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究）
Most of the prior work on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) achieves optimal collaboration by directly controlling the agents to maximize a common reward. In this paper, we aim to address this from a different angle. In particular, we consider scenarios where there are self-interested agents (i.e., worker agents) which have their own minds (preferences, intentions, skills, etc.) and can not be dictated to perform tasks they do not wish to do. For achieving optimal coordination among these agents, we train a super agent (i.e., the manager) to manage them by first inferring their minds b…
Recently, deep multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) has become a highly active research area as many real-world problems can be inherently viewed as multiagent systems. A particularly interesting and widely applicable class of problems is the partially observable cooperative multiagent setting, in which a team of agents learns to coordinate their behaviors conditioning on their private observations and commonly shared global reward signals. One natural solution is to resort to the centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm. During centralized training, one key challenge is t…
