Feudal Multi-Agent Hierarchies for Cooperative Reinforcement Learning
This addresses coordination challenges in multi-agent systems, offering a hierarchical solution for decentralized learning and control.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling reinforcement learning agents to cooperate effectively by introducing Feudal Multi-agent Hierarchies (FMH), where a manager communicates subgoals to workers, resulting in substantially better performance and scalability compared to shared-reward approaches.
We investigate how reinforcement learning agents can learn to cooperate. Drawing inspiration from human societies, in which successful coordination of many individuals is often facilitated by hierarchical organisation, we introduce Feudal Multi-agent Hierarchies (FMH). In this framework, a 'manager' agent, which is tasked with maximising the environmentally-determined reward function, learns to communicate subgoals to multiple, simultaneously-operating, 'worker' agents. Workers, which are rewarded for achieving managerial subgoals, take concurrent actions in the world. We outline the structure of FMH and demonstrate its potential for decentralised learning and control. We find that, given an adequate set of subgoals from which to choose, FMH performs, and particularly scales, substantially better than cooperative approaches that use a shared reward function.