Distributed off-Policy Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning with Policy Consensus

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update their local value function estimates independently. Then, we introduce an additional consensus step to let all the agents asymptotically achieve agreement on the global optimal policy function. The convergence analysis of the proposed algorithm is provided and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated using a distributed resource allocation example. Compared to relevant distributed actor critic methods, here the agents do not share information about their local tasks, but instead they coordinate to estimate the global policy function.