Human players in professional team sports achieve high level coordination by dynamically choosing complementary skills and executing primitive actions to perform these skills. As a step toward creating intelligent agents with this capability for fully cooperative multi-agent settings, we propose a two-level hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm with unsupervised skill discovery. Agents learn useful and distinct skills at the low level via independent Q-learning, while they learn to select complementary latent skill variables at the high level via centralized multi-agent training with an extrinsic team reward. The set of low-level skills emerges from an intrinsic reward that solely promotes the decodability of latent skill variables from the trajectory of a low-level skill, without the need for hand-crafted rewards for each skill. For scalable decentralized execution, each agent independently chooses latent skill variables and primitive actions based on local observations. Our overall method enables the use of general cooperative MARL algorithms for training high level policies and single-agent RL for training low level skills. Experiments on a stochastic high dimensional team game show the emergence of useful skills and cooperative team play. The interpretability of the learned skills show the promise of the proposed method for achieving human-AI cooperation in team sports games.

Hierarchical Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Skill Discovery

The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined extrinsic reward function. However, a long-term question inevitably arises: how will such independent agents cooperate when they are continually learning and acting in a shared multi-agent environment? Observing that humans often provide incentives to influence others' behavior, we propose to equip each RL agent in a multi-agent environment with the ability to give rewards directly to other agents, via a learned incentive function. Each agent learns the incentive function by considering how the given incentives affect its own extrinsic objective, through the learning of agents who receive incentives. We demonstrate in experiments that such agents significantly outperform policy gradient agents and opponent-shaping agents in a small yet challenging general-sum Markov game. Our work points toward a more general research program of endowing agents with expanded capabilities for incentivizing others to ensure the common good in a multi-agent future.

Learning to Incentivize Other Learning Agents

This video presentation presents the main work we have done for investigating of Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Multi-traffic Light Control.

Integrating independent and centralized multi-agent  reinforcement learning for traffic signal network optimization

Learning and Adaptation

technical paper

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

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AAMAS 2020

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

Jiachen Yang

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Hierarchical Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Skill Discovery

Learning to Incentivize Other Learning Agents

Integrating independent and centralized multi-agent reinforcement learning for traffic signal network optimization

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