在合作多智能体强化学习（MARL）中，智能体旨在实现共同目标，例如击败敌人或进球。现有MARL算法虽然有效，但仍需要大量学习时间，且常因复杂任务陷入局部最优，进而无法发现达成目标的策略。为解决这一问题，我们提出了适用于MARL的高效情景记忆利用（Efficient episodic Memory Utilization，EMU）方法，其有两个核心目标：（a）通过利用情景缓冲区中语义连贯的记忆加速强化学习；（b）选择性地促进理想转换以防止局部收敛。为实现目标（a），EMU在MARL基础上引入了可训练的编码器/解码器结构，生成连贯的记忆嵌入以促进探索性记忆回忆。为实现目标（b），EMU提出了一种基于状态合意性的新型奖励结构，称为情景激励（episodic incentive）。该奖励改进了Q学习中的TD目标，并作为理想转换的额外激励。我们为所提出的激励机制提供了理论支撑，并证明了EMU相较于传统情景控制的有效性。我们在StarCraft II和Google Research Football环境中对该方法进行了评估，实验结果表明，其性能相较于现有最优方法有进一步提升。
英文摘要：
In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents aim to achieve a common goal, such as defeating enemies or scoring a goal. Existing MARL algorithms are effective but still require significant learning time and often get trapped in local optima by complex tasks, subsequently failing to discover a goal-reaching policy. To address this, we introduce Efficient episodic Memory Utilization (EMU) for MARL, with two primary objectives: (a) accelerating reinforcement learning by leveraging semantically coherent memory from an episodic buffer and (b) selectively promoting desirable transitions to prevent local convergence. To achieve (a), EMU incorporates a trainable encoder/decoder structure alongside MARL, creating coherent memory embeddings that facilitate exploratory memory recall. To achieve (b), EMU introduces a novel reward structure called episodic incentive based on the desirability of states. This reward improves the TD target in Q-learning and acts as an additional incentive for desirable transitions. We provide theoretical support for the proposed incentive and demonstrate the effectiveness of EMU compared to conventional episodic control. The proposed method is evaluated in StarCraft II and Google Research Football, and empirical results indicate further performance improvement over state-of-the-art methods.
Reinforcement learning in cooperative multi-agent settings has recently advanced significantly in its scope, with applications in cooperative estimation for advertising, dynamic treatment regimes, distributed control, and federated learning. In this paper, we discuss the problem of cooperative multi-agent RL with function approximation, where a group of agents communicates with each other to jointly solve an episodic MDP. We demonstrate that via careful message-passing and cooperative value iteration, it is possible to achieve near-optimal no-regret learning even with a fixed constant communic…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Microsoft 365（微软365）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Oversubscription is a common practice for improving cloud resource utilization. It allows the cloud service provider to sell more resources than the physical limit, assuming not all users would fully utilize the resources simultaneously. However, how to design an oversubscription policy that improves utilization while satisfying the some safety constraints remains an open problem. Existing methods and industrial practices are over-conservative, ignoring the coordination of diverse resource usage patterns and probabilistic constraints. To address these two limitations, this paper formulates the…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；NetEase（网易）
Efficient exploration in deep cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) still remains challenging in complex coordination problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel Episodic Multi-agent reinforcement learning with Curiosity-driven exploration, called EMC. We leverage an insight of popular factorized MARL algorithms that the "induced" individual Q-values, i.e., the individual utility functions used for local execution, are the embeddings of local action-observation histories, and can capture the interaction between agents due to reward backpropagation during centralized training.…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) has been proved to be a successful reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for continuous control tasks. However, DDPG still suffers from data insufficiency and training inefficiency, especially in computationally complex environments. In this paper, we propose Asynchronous Episodic DDPG (AE-DDPG), as an expansion of DDPG, which can achieve more effective learning with less training time required. First, we design a modified scheme for data collection in an asynchronous fashion. Generally, for asynchronous RL algorithms, sample efficiency or/and training…
University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；University of Neuchatel（纳沙泰尔大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
We study the problem of designing autonomous agents that can learn to cooperate effectively with a potentially suboptimal partner while having no access to the joint reward function. This problem is modeled as a cooperative episodic two-agent Markov decision process. We assume control over only the first of the two agents in a Stackelberg formulation of the game, where the second agent is acting so as to maximise expected utility given the first agent's policy. How should the first agent act in order to learn the joint reward function as quickly as possible and so that the joint policy is as c…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Cooperative problems under continuous control have always been the focus of multi-agent reinforcement learning. Existing algorithms suffer from the problem of uneven learning degree with the increase of the number of agents. In this paper, a new structure for a multi-agent actor critic is proposed, and the self-attention mechanism is applied in the critic network and the value decomposition method used to solve the uneven problem. The proposed algorithm makes full use of the samples in the replay memory buffer to learn the behavior of a class of agents. First, a new update method is proposed f…
PC3D: Zero-Shot Cooperation Across Variable Rosters via Personalized Context Distillation
Doctoral School of Exact and Natural Sciences, Jagiellonian University（杰哥利昂大学精确与自然科学博士学院）；Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Jagiellonian University（杰哥利昂大学数学与计算机科学学院）
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) and network function virtualization (NFV) are promising technologies to support emerging IoT applications, especially those computation-intensive. In NFV-enabled MEC environment, service function chain (SFC), i.e., a set of ordered virtual network functions (VNFs), can be mapped on MEC servers. Mobile devices (MDs) can offload computation-intensive applications, which can be represented by SFCs, fully or partially to MEC servers for remote execution. This paper studies the partial offloading and SFC mapping joint optimization (POSMJO) problem in an NFV-enabled…
Cooperative communication is an effective approach to improve spectrum utilization. In order to reduce outage probability of communication system, most studies propose various schemes for relay selection and power allocation, which are based on the assumption of channel state information (CSI). However, it is difficult to get an accurate CSI in practice. In this paper, we study the outage probability minimizing problem subjected to a total transmission power constraint in a two-hop cooperative relay network. We use reinforcement learning (RL) methods to learn strategies for relay selection and…
In this paper, dynamic non-cooperative coexistence between a cognitive pulsed radar and a nearby communications system is addressed by applying nonlinear value function approximation via deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL) to develop a policy for optimal radar performance. The radar learns to vary the bandwidth and center frequency of its linear frequency modulated (LFM) waveforms to mitigate mutual interference with other systems and improve target detection performance while also maintaining sufficient utilization of the available frequency bands required for a fine range resolution. We de…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Under dynamic traffic, service function chain (SFC) migration is considered as an effective way to improve resource utilization. However, the lack of future network information leads to non-optimal solutions, which motivates us to study reinforcement learning based SFC migration from a long-term perspective. In this paper, we formulate the SFC migration problem as a minimization problem with the objective of total network operation cost under constraints of users' quality of service. We firstly design a deep Q-network based algorithm to solve single SFC migration problem, which can adjust migr…
STAS: Spatial-Temporal Return Decomposition for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；National Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, BIGAI（通用人工智能全国重点实验室）
In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents only have access to partial observations, efficiently leveraging local information is critical. During long-time observations, agents can build \textit{awareness} for teammates to alleviate the problem of partial observability. However, previous MARL methods usually neglect this kind of utilization of local information. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework, multi-agent \textit{Local INformation Decomposition for Awareness of teammates} (LINDA), with which agents learn to decompose local information and buil…
