Efficient Distributed Framework for Collaborative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
This work addresses training efficiency and stability issues for researchers and practitioners in multi-agent systems, representing an incremental improvement over existing distributed methods.
The paper tackles slow sample collection and poor exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning by designing a distributed framework based on actor-worker-learner architecture, which improves sample diversity and accelerates policy iteration, achieving verified effectiveness in military simulation and gaming environments.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning for incomplete information environments has attracted extensive attention from researchers. However, due to the slow sample collection and poor sample exploration, there are still some problems in multi-agent reinforcement learning, such as unstable model iteration and low training efficiency. Moreover, most of the existing distributed framework are proposed for single-agent reinforcement learning and not suitable for multi-agent. In this paper, we design an distributed MARL framework based on the actor-work-learner architecture. In this framework, multiple asynchronous environment interaction modules can be deployed simultaneously, which greatly improves the sample collection speed and sample diversity. Meanwhile, to make full use of computing resources, we decouple the model iteration from environment interaction, and thus accelerate the policy iteration. Finally, we verified the effectiveness of propose framework in MaCA military simulation environment and the SMAC 3D realtime strategy gaming environment with imcomplete information characteristics.