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A Meta-Gradient Approach To Learning Cooperative Multi-Agent Communication Topology, Qi Zhang, Dingyang Chen

Publications

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents often can only partially observe the environment state, and thus communication is crucial to achieving coordination. Communicating agents must simultaneously learn to whom to communicate (i.e., communication topology) and how to interpret the received message for decision-making. Although agents can efficiently learn communication interpretation by end-to-end backpropagation, learning communication topology is much trickier since the binary decisions of whether to communicate impede end-to-end differentiation. As evidenced in our experiments, existing solutions, such as reparameterization tricks and reformulating topology learning as reinforcement learning, often fall short. This paper introduces a meta-learning framework that aims …