Learning to Transfer Role Assignment Across Team Sizes
This addresses the challenge of coordination in multi-agent systems for tasks requiring adaptive role assignment, though it is incremental by building on existing role-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of scaling role-based multi-agent reinforcement learning to varying team sizes by proposing a framework that learns role assignment from small teams and transfers it to larger ones, achieving superior performance in Prey-Predator games and StarCraft II benchmarks.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning holds the key for solving complex tasks that demand the coordination of learning agents. However, strong coordination often leads to expensive exploration over the exponentially large state-action space. A powerful approach is to decompose team works into roles, which are ideally assigned to agents with the relevant skills. Training agents to adaptively choose and play emerging roles in a team thus allows the team to scale to complex tasks and quickly adapt to changing environments. These promises, however, have not been fully realised by current role-based multi-agent reinforcement learning methods as they assume either a pre-defined role structure or a fixed team size. We propose a framework to learn role assignment and transfer across team sizes. In particular, we train a role assignment network for small teams by demonstration and transfer the network to larger teams, which continue to learn through interaction with the environment. We demonstrate that re-using the role-based credit assignment structure can foster the learning process of larger reinforcement learning teams to achieve tasks requiring different roles. Our proposal outperforms competing techniques in enriched role-enforcing Prey-Predator games and in new scenarios in the StarCraft II Micro-Management benchmark.