Interaction-Aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Agents with Individual Goals

-- In a multi-agent setting, the optimal policy of a single agent is largely dependent on the behavior of other agents. We investigate the problem of multi-agent reinforcement learning, focusing on decentralized learning in non-stationary domains for mobile robot navigation. We identify a cause for the difficulty in training non-stationary policies: mutual adaptation to sub-optimal behaviors, and we use this to motivate a curriculum-based strategy for learning interactive policies. The curriculum has two stages. First, the agent leverages policy gradient algorithms to learn a policy that is capable of achieving multiple goals. Second, the agent learns a modifier policy to learn how to interact with other agents in a multi-agent setting. We evaluated our approach on both an autonomous driving lane-change domain and a robot navigation domain. Single agent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have made significant progress in game playing [20] and robotics [13], however, single agent learning algorithms in multi-agent settings are prone to learn stereotyped behaviors that over-fit to the training environment [22], [15]. There are several reasons why multi-agent environments are more difficult: 1) interacting with an unknown agent requires having either multiple responses to a given situation or a more nuanced ability to perceive differences. The former breaks the Markov assumption, the latter rules out simpler solutions which are likely to be found first.