Policy Evaluation and Seeking for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Best Response
This work addresses policy evaluation challenges in multi-agent reinforcement learning, offering a novel approach for handling dynamical behaviors, but it is incremental as it builds on existing game-theoretic concepts like sink equilibrium.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating and ranking policies in multi-agent reinforcement learning by introducing cycle-based and memory-based metrics based on sink equilibrium, using strict best response dynamics to handle cyclical behaviors and non-stationarity, with results showing that policies with maximum metric are observed with nonzero probability or within a given tolerance of optimal.
This paper introduces two metrics (cycle-based and memory-based metrics), grounded on a dynamical game-theoretic solution concept called sink equilibrium, for the evaluation, ranking, and computation of policies in multi-agent learning. We adopt strict best response dynamics (SBRD) to model selfish behaviors at a meta-level for multi-agent reinforcement learning. Our approach can deal with dynamical cyclical behaviors (unlike approaches based on Nash equilibria and Elo ratings), and is more compatible with single-agent reinforcement learning than alpha-rank which relies on weakly better responses. We first consider settings where the difference between largest and second largest underlying metric has a known lower bound. With this knowledge we propose a class of perturbed SBRD with the following property: only policies with maximum metric are observed with nonzero probability for a broad class of stochastic games with finite memory. We then consider settings where the lower bound for the difference is unknown. For this setting, we propose a class of perturbed SBRD such that the metrics of the policies observed with nonzero probability differ from the optimal by any given tolerance. The proposed perturbed SBRD addresses the opponent-induced non-stationarity by fixing the strategies of others for the learning agent, and uses empirical game-theoretic analysis to estimate payoffs for each strategy profile obtained due to the perturbation.