Balancing Rational and Other-Regarding Preferences in Cooperative-Competitive Environments
This addresses the problem of unfair reward allocation in mixed environments for multi-agent reinforcement learning researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on prior algorithms.
The paper tackles the challenge of balancing individual and social incentives in mixed cooperative-competitive environments, proposing BAROCCO, an extension of QMIX and COMA, which experimentally shows advantages over existing methods in two multi-agent setups.
Recent reinforcement learning studies extensively explore the interplay between cooperative and competitive behaviour in mixed environments. Unlike cooperative environments where agents strive towards a common goal, mixed environments are notorious for the conflicts of selfish and social interests. As a consequence, purely rational agents often struggle to achieve and maintain cooperation. A prevalent approach to induce cooperative behaviour is to assign additional rewards based on other agents' well-being. However, this approach suffers from the issue of multi-agent credit assignment, which can hinder performance. This issue is efficiently alleviated in cooperative setting with such state-of-the-art algorithms as QMIX and COMA. Still, when applied to mixed environments, these algorithms may result in unfair allocation of rewards. We propose BAROCCO, an extension of these algorithms capable to balance individual and social incentives. The mechanism behind BAROCCO is to train two distinct but interwoven components that jointly affect each agent's decisions. Our meta-algorithm is compatible with both Q-learning and Actor-Critic frameworks. We experimentally confirm the advantages over the existing methods and explore the behavioural aspects of BAROCCO in two mixed multi-agent setups.