Na Yu

Shunyu Liu, Jie Song, Yihe Zhou et al.

Deep cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning has demonstrated its remarkable success over a wide spectrum of complex control tasks. However, recent advances in multi-agent learning mainly focus on value decomposition while leaving entity interactions still intertwined, which easily leads to over-fitting on noisy interactions between entities. In this work, we introduce a novel interactiOn Pattern disenTangling (OPT) method, to disentangle the entity interactions into interaction prototypes, each of which represents an underlying interaction pattern within a subgroup of the entities. OPT facilitates filtering the noisy interactions between irrelevant entities and thus significantly improves generalizability as well as interpretability. Specifically, OPT introduces a sparse disagreement mechanism to encourage sparsity and diversity among discovered interaction prototypes. Then the model selectively restructures these prototypes into a compact interaction pattern by an aggregator with learnable weights. To alleviate the training instability issue caused by partial observability, we propose to maximize the mutual information between the aggregation weights and the history behaviors of each agent. Experiments on single-task, multi-task and zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method yields results superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts. Our code is available at https://github.com/liushunyu/OPT.

Shunyu Liu, Kaixuan Chen, Na Yu et al.

Despite the promising results achieved, state-of-the-art interactive reinforcement learning schemes rely on passively receiving supervision signals from advisor experts, in the form of either continuous monitoring or pre-defined rules, which inevitably result in a cumbersome and expensive learning process. In this paper, we introduce a novel initiative advisor-in-the-loop actor-critic framework, termed as Ask-AC, that replaces the unilateral advisor-guidance mechanism with a bidirectional learner-initiative one, and thereby enables a customized and efficacious message exchange between learner and advisor. At the heart of Ask-AC are two complementary components, namely action requester and adaptive state selector, that can be readily incorporated into various discrete actor-critic architectures. The former component allows the agent to initiatively seek advisor intervention in the presence of uncertain states, while the latter identifies the unstable states potentially missed by the former especially when environment changes, and then learns to promote the ask action on such states. Experimental results on both stationary and non-stationary environments and across different actor-critic backbones demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves the learning efficiency of the agent, and achieves the performances on par with those obtained by continuous advisor monitoring.

Kaixuan Chen, Jie Song, Shunyu Liu et al.

Graph-level representation learning is the pivotal step for downstream tasks that operate on the whole graph. The most common approach to this problem heretofore is graph pooling, where node features are typically averaged or summed to obtain the graph representations. However, pooling operations like averaging or summing inevitably cause massive information missing, which may severely downgrade the final performance. In this paper, we argue what is crucial to graph-level downstream tasks includes not only the topological structure but also the distribution from which nodes are sampled. Therefore, powered by existing Graph Neural Networks (GNN), we propose a new plug-and-play pooling module, termed as Distribution Knowledge Embedding (DKEPool), where graphs are rephrased as distributions on top of GNNs and the pooling goal is to summarize the entire distribution information instead of retaining a certain feature vector by simple predefined pooling operations. A DKEPool network de facto disassembles representation learning into two stages, structure learning and distribution learning. Structure learning follows a recursive neighborhood aggregation scheme to update node features where structure information is obtained. Distribution learning, on the other hand, omits node interconnections and focuses more on the distribution depicted by all the nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed DKEPool significantly and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.