Policy Distillation and Value Matching in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning

• Published in: 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) pp. 8193 - 8200
• Main Authors: Wadhwania, Samir, Kim, Dong-Ki, Omidshafiei, Shayegan, How, Jonathan P.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.11.2019
• ISSN: 2153-0866
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967849

Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms have been demonstrated on complex tasks that require the coordination of a team of multiple agents to complete. Existing works have focused on sharing information between agents via centralized critics to stabilize learning or through communication to improve performance, but do not generally consider how information can be shared between agents to address the curse of dimensionality in MARL. We posit that a multiagent problem can be decomposed into a multi-task problem where each agent explores a subset of the state space instead of exploring the entire state space. This paper introduces a multiagent actor-critic algorithm for combining knowledge from homogeneous agents through distillation and value-matching that outperforms policy distillation alone and allows further learning in discrete and continuous action spaces.