LEARNING TO SCHEDULE COMMUNICATION IN MULTI-AGENT REINFORCEMENT LEARNING

ABSTRACT

Many real-world reinforcement learning tasks require multiple agents to make se- quential decisions under the agents’ interaction, where well-coordinated actions among the agents are crucial to achieve the target goal better at these tasks. One way to accelerate the coordination effect is to enable multiple agents to communi- cate with each other in a distributed manner and behave as a group. In this paper, we study a practical scenario when (i) the communication bandwidth is limited and (ii) the agents share the communication medium so that only a restricted num- ber of agents are able to simultaneously use the medium, as in the state-of-the-art wireless networking standards. This calls for a certain form of communication scheduling. In that regard, we propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learn- ing framework, called SchedNet, in which agents learn how to schedule them- selves, how to encode the messages, and how to select actions based