Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent Systems: A Review of Challenges, Solutions and Applications
It provides a survey for researchers on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning, but is incremental as it reviews existing methods without new results.
This paper reviews deep reinforcement learning methods for multi-agent systems, analyzing challenges like non-stationarity and partial observability, and discusses applications to guide future robust solutions for real-world problems.
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been around for decades and employed to solve various sequential decision-making problems. These algorithms however have faced great challenges when dealing with high-dimensional environments. The recent development of deep learning has enabled RL methods to drive optimal policies for sophisticated and capable agents, which can perform efficiently in these challenging environments. This paper addresses an important aspect of deep RL related to situations that require multiple agents to communicate and cooperate to solve complex tasks. A survey of different approaches to problems related to multi-agent deep RL (MADRL) is presented, including non-stationarity, partial observability, continuous state and action spaces, multi-agent training schemes, multi-agent transfer learning. The merits and demerits of the reviewed methods will be analyzed and discussed, with their corresponding applications explored. It is envisaged that this review provides insights about various MADRL methods and can lead to future development of more robust and highly useful multi-agent learning methods for solving real-world problems.