通过贝叶斯网络建模智能体依赖关系,提升大规模多智能体强化学习效率。
Structured Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: a Bayesian Network Perspective
- 用贝叶斯网络刻画智能体间耦合结构,识别影响每个智能体价值函数的必要信息集。
- 提出部分集中训练、分散执行框架,理论证明其策略梯度方差低于传统方法。
- 在资源分配与温控任务中验证可扩展性,大规模场景下近似计算加速收敛。
多智能体强化学习(MARL)的实践成功激发了对更高效、可扩展算法的需求。然而,现有先进算法未能充分挖掘智能体间的耦合信息。本文提出一种系统性方法,利用智能体间耦合结构实现高效的无模型MARL。通过贝叶斯网络建模合作式MARL问题,定义了“价值依赖集”——每个智能体精确估计本地动作价值函数所需的信息集合。基于该集合,提出部分集中训练、分散执行(P-DTDE)范式。理论上证明,所提P-DTDE策略梯度估计器的总方差小于集中训练、分散执行(CTDE)方案。推导出基于P-DTDE的多智能体策略梯度定理,并开发出可扩展的演员-评论家算法。在多仓库资源分配和多区域温控任务中验证了算法的高效性与可扩展性。对于密集的价值依赖集,提出基于贝叶斯网络截断的近似方案,实验表明在智能体数量庞大的应用中,其收敛速度优于精确依赖集。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The empirical success of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has motivated the search for more efficient and scalable algorithms for large scale multi-agent systems. However, existing state-of-the-art algorithms do not fully exploit inter-agent coupling information to develop MARL algorithms. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to leverage structures in the inter-agent couplings for efficient model-free reinforcement learning. We model the cooperative MARL problem via a Bayesian network and characterize the subset of agents, termed as the value dependency set, whose information is required by each agent to estimate its local action value function exactly. Moreover, we propose a partially decentralized training decentralized execution (P-DTDE) paradigm based on the value dependency set. We theoretically establish that the total variance of our P-DTDE policy gradient estimator is less than the centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) policy gradient estimator. We derive a multi-agent policy gradient theorem based on the P-DTDE scheme and develop a scalable actor-critic algorithm. We demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the proposed algorithm on multi-warehouse resource allocation and multi-zone temperature control examples. For dense value dependency sets, we propose an approximation scheme based on truncation of the Bayesian network and empirically show that it achieves a faster convergence than the exact value dependence set for applications with a large number of agents.
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