Cooperative Multi-agent Control Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

This work considers the problem of learning cooperative policies in complex, partially observable domains without explicit communication. We extend three classes of single-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithms based on policy gradient, temporal-difference error, and actor-critic methods to cooperative multi-agent systems. We introduce a set of cooperative control tasks that includes tasks with discrete and continuous actions, as well as tasks that involve hundreds of agents. The three approaches are evaluated against each other using different neural architectures, training procedures, and reward structures. Using deep reinforcement learning with a curriculum learning scheme, our approach can solve problems that were previously considered intractable by most multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms. We show that policy gradient methods tend to outperform both temporal-difference and actor-critic methods when using feed-forward neural architectures. We also show that recurrent policies, while more difficult to train, outperform feed-forward policies on our evaluation tasks.