ICML 2021spotlight102 citations

FOP: Factorizing Optimal Joint Policy of Maximum-Entropy Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Tianhao Zhang, Yueheng Li, Chen Wang, Guangming Xie, Zongqing Lu

Abstract

Value decomposition recently injects vigorous vitality into multi-agent actor-critic methods. However, existing decomposed actor-critic methods cannot guarantee the convergence of global optimum. In this paper, we present a novel multi-agent actor-critic method, FOP, which can factorize the optimal joint policy induced by maximum-entropy multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) into individual policies. Theoretically, we prove that factorized individual policies of FOP converge to the global optimum. Empirically, in the well-known matrix game and differential game, we verify that FOP can converge to the global optimum for both discrete and continuous action spaces. We also evaluate FOP on a set of StarCraft II micromanagement tasks, and demonstrate that FOP substantially outperforms state-of-the-art decomposed value-based and actor-critic methods.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v139-zhang21m,
  title = 	 {FOP: Factorizing Optimal Joint Policy of Maximum-Entropy Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning},
  author =       {Zhang, Tianhao and Li, Yueheng and Wang, Chen and Xie, Guangming and Lu, Zongqing},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = 	 {12491--12500},
  year = 	 {2021},
  editor = 	 {Meila, Marina and Zhang, Tong},
  volume = 	 {139},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {18--24 Jul},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/zhang21m/zhang21m.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/zhang21m.html},
  abstract = 	 {Value decomposition recently injects vigorous vitality into multi-agent actor-critic methods. However, existing decomposed actor-critic methods cannot guarantee the convergence of global optimum. In this paper, we present a novel multi-agent actor-critic method, FOP, which can factorize the optimal joint policy induced by maximum-entropy multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) into individual policies. Theoretically, we prove that factorized individual policies of FOP converge to the global optimum. Empirically, in the well-known matrix game and differential game, we verify that FOP can converge to the global optimum for both discrete and continuous action spaces. We also evaluate FOP on a set of StarCraft II micromanagement tasks, and demonstrate that FOP substantially outperforms state-of-the-art decomposed value-based and actor-critic methods.}
}
FOP: Factorizing Optimal Joint Policy of Maximum-Entropy Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning · ICML 2021