The Dynamics of Reinforcement Social Learning in Cooperative Multiagent Systems

Coordination in cooperative multiagent systems is an important problem in multiagent learning literature. In practical complex environments, the interactions between agents can be sparse, and each agent’s interacting partners may change frequently and randomly. To this end, we investigate the multiagent coordination problems in cooperative environments under the social learning framework. We consider a large population of agents where each agent interacts with another agent randomly chosen from the population in each round. Each agent learns its policy through repeated interactions with the rest of agents via social learning. It is not clear a priori if all agents can learn a consistent optimal coordination policy in such a situation. We distinguish two types of learners: individual action learner and joint action learner. The learning performance of both learners are evaluated under a number of challenging cooperative games, and the influence of the information sharing degree on the learning performance is investigated as well.