Title
Knowru: Knowledge Reuse Via Knowledge Distillation In Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Abstract
Recently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved significant progress in the multi-agent domain. However, training for increasingly complex tasks would be time-consuming and resource intensive. To alleviate this problem, efficient leveraging of historical experience is essential, which is under-explored in previous studies because most existing methods fail to achieve this goal in a continuously dynamic system owing to their complicated design. In this paper, we propose a method for knowledge reuse called "KnowRU", which can be easily deployed in the majority of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms without requiring complicated hand-coded design. We employ the knowledge distillation paradigm to transfer knowledge among agents to shorten the training phase for new tasks while improving the asymptotic performance of agents. To empirically demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of KnowRU, we perform extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MARL algorithms in collaborative and competitive scenarios. The results show that KnowRU outperforms recently reported methods and not only successfully accelerates the training phase, but also improves the training performance, emphasizing the importance of the proposed knowledge reuse for MARL.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.3390/e23081043
ENTROPY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
multi-agent reinforcement learning, knowledge reuse, knowledge distillation
Journal
23
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
8
1099-4300
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zijian Gao100.68
Kele Xu24621.80
Bo Ding321.43
Huaimin Wang402.37
Li Yiying574.30
Hongda Jia600.34