International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (Oct 2021)

Generating individual intrinsic reward for cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning

  • Haolin Wu,
  • Hui Li,
  • Jianwei Zhang,
  • Zhuang Wang,
  • Jianeng Zhang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/17298814211044946
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 18

Abstract

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Multiagent reinforcement learning holds considerable promise to deal with cooperative multiagent tasks. Unfortunately, the only global reward shared by all agents in the cooperative tasks may lead to the lazy agent problem. To cope with such a problem, we propose a generating individual intrinsic reward algorithm, which introduces an intrinsic reward encoder to generate an individual intrinsic reward for each agent and utilizes the hypernetworks as the decoder to help to estimate the individual action values of the decomposition methods based on the generated individual intrinsic reward. Experimental results in the StarCraft II micromanagement benchmark prove that the proposed algorithm can increase learning efficiency and improve policy performance.