ClusterComm: Discrete Communication in Decentralized MARL using Internal Representation Clustering

Müller, Robert, Turalic, Hasan, Phan, Thomy, Kölle, Michael, Nüßlein, Jonas, Linnhoff-Popien, Claudia

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

Addressing this, we introduce ClusterComm, a fully decentralized MARL framework where agents communicate discretely without a central control unit. ClusterComm utilizes Mini-Batch-K-Means clustering on the last hidden layer's activations of an agent's policy network, translating them into discrete messages. This approach outperforms no communication and competes favorably with unbounded, continuous communication and hence poses a simple yet effective strategy for enhancing collaborative task-solving in MARL.