Title
Hurts to Be Too Early: Benefits and Drawbacks of Communication in Multi-Agent Learning
Abstract
We study a multi-agent partially observable environment in which autonomous agents aim to coordinate their actions, while also learning the parameters of the unknown environment through repeated interactions. In particular, we focus on the role of communication in a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem. We consider a learning algorithm in which agents make decisions based on their own observations of the environment, as well as the observations of other agents, which are collected through communication between agents. We first identify two potential benefits of this type of information sharing when agents’ observation quality is heterogeneous: (1) it can facilitate coordination among agents, and (2) it can enhance the learning of all participants, including the better informed agents. We show however that these benefits of communication depend in general on its timing, so that delayed information sharing may be preferred in certain scenarios.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2019
ieee international conference computer and communications
Games,Reinforcement learning,Information management,Collaboration,Timing,Multi-agent systems,Decision making
Field
DocType
ISSN
Autonomous agent,Information management,Computer science,Multi-agent system,Information sharing,Distributed computing,Reinforcement learning
Conference
0743-166X
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-7281-0515-4
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Parinaz Naghizadeh1439.38
Maria Gorlatova221714.75
Andrew S. Lan311723.10
Mung Chiang47303486.32