arXiv:2505.20579cs.LGcs.AI2025-05被引 1

研究多智能体中‘隐性馈赠’的信用分配难题,发现主流算法难解决。

The challenge of hidden gifts in multi-agent reinforcement learning

  • 设计网格世界任务,让智能体共享唯一钥匙以获集体奖励。
  • 多种先进MARL算法无法学会协作,即使有动作历史也失败。
  • 引入自学习感知修正项,显著提升收敛稳定性与成功率。

在多智能体强化学习中,当他人采取有益行动但未被察觉时,会产生‘隐藏馈赠’现象。本文通过一个简单网格世界任务研究此问题:每个智能体需解锁个人门以获得个体奖励,若所有智能体完成解锁,则可获得更大集体奖励。但仅有一把钥匙可供共享,必须在使用后丢弃给其他智能体,而丢弃行为无任何提示,因此对后续智能体而言是隐藏馈赠。实验表明,多种先进MARL算法(包括专用架构)均无法学习获取集体奖励。有趣的是,仅提供自身动作历史的去中心化演员-评论家策略梯度方法能成功;但标准MARL方法即便有历史信息仍失败。本文提出一种受学习感知启发的策略梯度修正项,有效降低学习方差,使算法更可靠地收敛至集体成功。结果表明,在存在隐藏馈赠的场景下,信用分配极具挑战性,且去中心化智能体具备自我学习感知能力可显著提升性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Sometimes we benefit from actions that others have taken even when we are unaware that they took those actions. For example, if your neighbor chooses not to take a parking spot in front of your house when you are not there, you can benefit, even without being aware that they took this action. These ``hidden gifts'' represent an interesting challenge for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), since assigning credit when the beneficial actions of others are hidden is non-trivial. Here, we study the impact of hidden gifts with a simple MARL task. In this task, agents in a grid-world environment have individual doors to unlock in order to obtain individual rewards. As well, if all the agents unlock their door the group receives a larger collective reward. However, there is only one key for all of the doors, such that the collective reward can only be obtained when the agents drop the key for others after they use it. Notably, there is nothing to indicate to an agent that the other agents have dropped the key, thus this act for others is a ``hidden gift''. We show that several different state-of-the-art MARL algorithms, including MARL specific architectures, fail to learn how to obtain the collective reward in this simple task. Interestingly, we find that decentralized actor-critic policy gradient agents can succeed when we provide them with information about their own action history, but MARL agents still cannot solve the task with action history. Finally, we derive a correction term for policy gradient agents, inspired by learning aware approaches, which reduces the variance in learning and helps them to converge to collective success more reliably. These results show that credit assignment in multi-agent settings can be particularly challenging in the presence of ``hidden gifts'', and demonstrate that self learning-awareness in decentralized agents can benefit these settings.

多智能体信用分配强化学习协同机制

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