Full communication memory networks for team-level cooperation learning

Abstract

Communication in multi-agent systems is a key driver of team-level cooperation, for instance allowing individual agents to augment their knowledge about the world in partially-observable environments. In this paper, we propose two reinforcement learning-based multi-agent models, namely FCMNet and FCMTran. The two models both allow agents to simultaneously learn a differentiable communication mechanism that connects all agents as well as a common, cooperative policy conditioned upon received information. FCMNet utilizes multiple directional Long Short-Term Memory chains to sequentially transmit and encode the current observation-based messages sent by every other agent at each timestep. FCMTran further relies on the encoder of a modified transformer to simultaneously aggregate multiple self-generated messages sent by all agents at the previous timestep into a single message that is used in the current timestep. Results from evaluating our models on a challenging set of StarCraft II micromanagement tasks with shared rewards show that FCMNet and FCMTran both outperform recent communication-based methods and value decomposition methods in almost all tested StarCraft II micromanagement tasks. We further improve the performance of our models by combining them with value decomposition techniques; there, in particular, we show that FCMTran with value decomposition significantly pushes the state-of-the-art on one of the hardest benchmark tasks without any task-specific tuning. We also investigate the robustness of FCMNet under communication disturbances (i.e., binarized messages, random message loss, and random communication order) in an asymmetric collaborative pathfinding task with individual rewards, demonstrating FMCNet’s potential applicability in real-world robotic tasks.