Influence-Focused Asymmetric Island Model

Learning good joint-behaviors is challenging in multiagent settings due to the inherent non-stationarity: agents adapt their policies and act simultaneously. This is aggravated when the agents are asymmetric (agents have distinct capabilities and objectives) and must learn complementary behaviors required to work as a team. The Asymmetric Island Model partially addresses this by independently optimizing class-specific and team-wide behaviors. However, optimizing class-specific behaviors in isolation can produce egocentric behaviors that yield sub-optimal inter-class behaviors. This work introduces the Influence-Focused Asymmetric Island model (IF-AIM), a hierarchical framework that explicitly reinforces inter-class behaviors by optimizing class-specific behaviors conditioned on the expectation of behaviors of the complementary agent classes. An experiment in the harvest environment highlights the effectiveness of our method in optimizing adaptable inter-class behaviors.