Collaborative Training of Multiple Autonomous Agents

Exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning is a challenging problem, especially with a large number of agents. Parameter sharing between agents is often used since it significantly decreases the number of trainable parameters, shortening training times to tractable levels and improving exploration efficiency. We present two algorithms that aim to be a middle ground between not sharing parameters and fully sharing parameters. These proposed algorithms show advantages of the baselines at the two ends of the spectrum and minimise their drawbacks. First, Shared Experience Actor-Critic [3], applies the basic idea of off-policy correction via importance weighting and combines the experiences generated by different agents into more informative and effective learning gradients. Then, Selective Parameter Sharing [2], based on rigorous empirical analysis of the impact of parameter sharing proposes a novel parameter sharing method that can be coupled with existing multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms.