Learning Communication Skills in Multi-task Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
Poster C: Tuesday -- 11:00 - 12:30
Changxi Zhu, Mehdi Dastani, Shihan Wang
Keywords: multi-task learning, multi-agent deep reinforcement learning, communication
In multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL), agents can communicate with
one another to perform a task in a coordinated manner. When multiple tasks are involved,
agents can also leverage knowledge from one task to improve learning in other tasks.
In this paper, we propose Multi-task Communication Skills (MCS), a MADRL method
with communication that learns and performs multiple tasks simultaneously, with agents
interacting through learnable communication protocols. Specifically, MCS adopts a task-
invariant communication protocol that enables communication under varying numbers
of agents and tasks with different observation and action spaces. To enhance coordinated
behaviors among agents, we further correlate communicated messages to agents’ policies
for each task. We adapt three existing multi-agent benchmark environments to multi-task
settings. Empirical results demonstrate that MCS achieves better performance than
multi-task MADRL baselines without communication, as well as single-task MADRL
baselines with and without communication.