Shared Experience Actor-Critic for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Abstract
Exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning is a challenging problem, especially in environments with sparse rewards. We propose a general method for efficient exploration by sharing experience amongst agents. Our proposed algorithm, called Shared Experience Actor-Critic (SEAC), applies experience sharing in an actor-critic framework. We evaluate SEAC in a collection of sparse-reward multi-agent environments and find that it consistently outperforms two baselines and two state-of-the-art algorithms by learning in fewer steps and converging to higher returns. In some harder environments, experience sharing makes the difference between learning to solve the task and not learning at all.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2006.07169,
title = {Shared Experience Actor-Critic for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning},
author = {Filippos Christianos and Lukas Schäfer and Stefano V. Albrecht},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.07169},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Published in 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), see https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/hash/7967cc8e3ab559e68cc944c44b1cf3e8-Abstract.html - This updated version of the paper is identical to the original paper published at NeurIPS 2020 but includes minor clarifications following recommendations in http://agents.inf.ed.ac.uk/blog/multiagent-rl-inaccuracies/