We design a simple reinforcement learning agent that, with a specification only of agent state dynamics and a reward function, can operate with some degree of competence in any environment. The agent maintains only visitation counts and value estimates for each agent-state-action pair. The value function is updated incrementally in response to temporal differences and optimistic boosts that encourage exploration. The agent executes actions that are greedy with respect to this value function. We establish a regret bound demonstrating convergence to near-optimal per-period performance, where the time taken to achieve near-optimality is polynomial in the number of agent states and actions, as well as the reward mixing time of the best policy within the reference policy class, which is comprised of those that depend on history only through agent state. Notably, there is no further dependence on the number of environment states or mixing times associated with other policies or statistics of history. Our result sheds light on the potential benefits of (deep) representation learning, which has demonstrated the capability to extract compact and relevant features from high-dimensional interaction histories.

In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.

Resource allocation and task prioritisation are key problem domains in the fields of autonomous vehicles, networking, and cloud computing. The challenge in developing efficient and robust algorithms comes from the dynamic nature of these systems, with many components communicating and interacting in complex ways. The multi-group resource allocation optimisation (MG-RAO) algorithm we present uses multiple function approximations of resource demand over time, alongside reinforcement learning techniques, to develop a novel method of optimising resource allocation in these multi-agent systems. This method is applicable where there are competing demands for shared resources, or in task prioritisation problems. Evaluation is carried out in a simulated environment containing multiple competing agents. We compare the new algorithm to an approach where child agents distribute their resources uniformly across all the tasks they can be allocated. We also contrast the performance of the algorithm where resource allocation is modelled separately for groups of agents, as to being modelled jointly over all agents. The MG-RAO algorithm shows a 23 - 28% improvement over fixed resource allocation in the simulated environments. Results also show that, in a volatile system, using the MG-RAO algorithm configured so that child agents model resource allocation for all agents as a whole has 46.5% of the performance of when it is set to model multiple groups of agents. These results demonstrate the ability of the algorithm to solve resource allocation problems in multi-agent systems and to perform well in dynamic environments.

The real world is awash with multi-agent problems that require collective action by self-interested agents, from the routing of packets across a computer network to the management of irrigation systems. Such systems have local incentives for individuals, whose behavior has an impact on the global outcome for the group. Given appropriate mechanisms describing agent interaction, groups may achieve socially beneficial outcomes, even in the face of short-term selfish incentives. In many cases, collective action problems possess an underlying graph structure, whose topology crucially determines the relationship between local decisions and emergent global effects. Such scenarios have received great attention through the lens of network games. However, this abstraction typically collapses important dimensions, such as geometry and time, relevant to the design of mechanisms promoting cooperation. In parallel work, multi-agent deep reinforcement learning has shown great promise in modelling the emergence of self-organized cooperation in complex gridworld domains. Here we apply this paradigm in graph-structured collective action problems. Using multi-agent deep reinforcement learning, we simulate an agent society for a variety of plausible mechanisms, finding clear transitions between different equilibria over time. We define analytic tools inspired by related literatures to measure the social outcomes, and use these to draw conclusions about the efficacy of different environmental interventions. Our methods have implications for mechanism design in both human and artificial agent systems.

Ubiquitous mobile computing have enabled ride-hailing services to collect vast amounts of behavioral data of riders and drivers and optimize supply and demand matching in real time. While these mobility service providers have some degree of control over the market by assigning vehicles to requests, they need to deal with the uncertainty arising from self-interested driver behavior since workers are usually free to drive when they are not assigned tasks. In this work, we formulate the problem of passenger-vehicle matching in a sparsely connected graph and proposed an algorithm to derive an equilibrium policy in a multi-agent environment. Our framework combines value iteration methods to estimate the optimal policy given expected state visitation and policy propagation to compute multi-agent state visitation frequencies. Furthermore, we developed a method to learn the driver's reward function transferable to an environment with significantly different dynamics from training data. We evaluated the robustness to changes in spatio-temporal supply-demand distributions and deterioration in data quality using a real-world taxi trajectory dataset; our approach significantly outperforms several baselines in terms of imitation accuracy. The computational time required to obtain an equilibrium policy shared by all vehicles does not depend on the number of agents, and even on the scale of real-world services, it takes only a few seconds on a single CPU.

Semantic web technologies have shown their effectiveness, especially when it comes to knowledge representation, reasoning, and data integrations. However, the original semantic web vision, whereby machine readable web data could be automatically actioned upon by intelligent software web agents, has yet to be realised. In order to better understand the existing technological challenges and opportunities, in this paper we examine the status quo in terms of intelligent software web agents, guided by research with respect to requirements and architectural components, coming from that agents community. We start by collating and summarising requirements and core architectural components relating to intelligent software agent. Following on from this, we use the identified requirements to both further elaborate on the semantic web agent motivating use case scenario, and to summarise different perspectives on the requirements when it comes to semantic web agent literature. Finally, we propose a hybrid semantic web agent architecture, discuss the role played by existing semantic web standards, and point to existing work in the broader semantic web community any beyond that could help us to make the semantic web agent vision a reality.

Value-based methods of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), especially the value decomposition methods, have been demonstrated on a range of challenging cooperative tasks. However, current methods pay little attention to the interaction between agents, which is essential to teamwork in games or real life. This limits the efficiency of value-based MARL algorithms in the two aspects: collaborative exploration and value function estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative MARL algorithm named as interactive actor-critic~(IAC), which models the interaction of agents from the perspectives of policy and value function. On the policy side, a multi-agent joint stochastic policy is introduced by adopting a collaborative exploration module, which is trained by maximizing the entropy-regularized expected return. On the value side, we use the shared attention mechanism to estimate the value function of each agent, which takes the impact of the teammates into consideration. At the implementation level, we extend the value decomposition methods to continuous control tasks and evaluate IAC on benchmark tasks including classic control and multi-agent particle environments. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and achieves better performance in terms of cooperation.

When solving a complex task, humans will spontaneously form teams and to complete different parts of the whole task, respectively. Meanwhile, the cooperation between teammates will improve efficiency. However, for current cooperative MARL methods, the cooperation team is constructed through either heuristics or end-to-end blackbox optimization. In order to improve the efficiency of cooperation and exploration, we propose a structured diversification emergence MARL framework named {\sc{Rochico}} based on reinforced organization control and hierarchical consensus learning. {\sc{Rochico}} first learns an adaptive grouping policy through the organization control module, which is established by independent multi-agent reinforcement learning. Further, the hierarchical consensus module based on the hierarchical intentions with consensus constraint is introduced after team formation. Simultaneously, utilizing the hierarchical consensus module and a self-supervised intrinsic reward enhanced decision module, the proposed cooperative MARL algorithm {\sc{Rochico}} can output the final diversified multi-agent cooperative policy. All three modules are organically combined to promote the structured diversification emergence. Comparative experiments on four large-scale cooperation tasks show that {\sc{Rochico}} is significantly better than the current SOTA algorithms in terms of exploration efficiency and cooperation strength.

Centralized Training for Decentralized Execution, where agents are trained offline using centralized information but execute in a decentralized manner online, has gained popularity in the multi-agent reinforcement learning community. In particular, actor-critic methods with a centralized critic and decentralized actors are a common instance of this idea. However, the implications of using a centralized critic in this context are not fully discussed and understood even though it is the standard choice of many algorithms. We therefore formally analyze centralized and decentralized critic approaches, providing a deeper understanding of the implications of critic choice. Because our theory makes unrealistic assumptions, we also empirically compare the centralized and decentralized critic methods over a wide set of environments to validate our theories and to provide practical advice. We show that there exist misconceptions regarding centralized critics in the current literature and show that the centralized critic design is not strictly beneficial, but rather both centralized and decentralized critics have different pros and cons that should be taken into account by algorithm designers.

Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning have been largely limited in training one model from scratch for every new task. The limitation is due to the restricted model architecture related to fixed input and output dimensions. This hinders the experience accumulation and transfer of the learned agent over tasks with diverse levels of difficulty (e.g. 3 vs 3 or 5 vs 6 multi-agent games). In this paper, we make the first attempt to explore a universal multi-agent reinforcement learning pipeline, designing one single architecture to fit tasks with the requirement of different observation and action configurations. Unlike previous RNN-based models, we utilize a transformer-based model to generate a flexible policy by decoupling the policy distribution from the intertwined input observation with an importance weight measured by the merits of the self-attention mechanism. Compared to a standard transformer block, the proposed model, named as Universal Policy Decoupling Transformer (UPDeT), further relaxes the action restriction and makes the multi-agent task's decision process more explainable. UPDeT is general enough to be plugged into any multi-agent reinforcement learning pipeline and equip them with strong generalization abilities that enables the handling of multiple tasks at a time. Extensive experiments on large-scale SMAC multi-agent competitive games demonstrate that the proposed UPDeT-based multi-agent reinforcement learning achieves significant results relative to state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating advantageous transfer capability in terms of both performance and training speed (10 times faster).