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General response (R1, R2, R3)

Neural Information Processing Systems

Dear Reviewers, we thank you for taking the time to provide valuable feedback. Below we address the main issues raised. Its performance depends on our ability to predict the distribution over future frames with low entropy. We will emphasize these aspects more in a revised version. RNNs to model dynamics in the latent space.


SupplementaryMaterialsof TheSurprisingEffectivenessofPPOinCooperative Multi-AgentGames

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the 3 fully cooperative tasks from the original set shown in Figure 1(a):Spread, Comm,andReference. "Use feature normalization" refers to whether the feature normalization is applied to the networkinput. In this appendix section, we include results which demonstrate the benefit of parameter sharing. Note that our global state to the value network has agent-specific information, such as available actions and relative distances to other agents. When an agent dies, these agent-specific features become zero, while the remaining agent-agnostic features remain nonzero -this leads to adrastic distribution shift in the critic input compared to states in which the agent is alive.




Supplementary Materials of The Surprising Effectiveness of PPO in Cooperative Multi-Agent Games

Neural Information Processing Systems

We assume here that all agents share critic and actor networks, for notational convenience. Gaussian Distribution, from which an action is sampled, in continuous action spaces. In the loss functions above, B refers to the batch size and n refers to the number of agents. Multi-agent Particle-World Environment (MPE) was introduced in (Lowe et al., 2017). StarCraftII Micromanagement Challenge (SMAC) tasks were introduced in (Rashid et al., 2019).



Policy Optimization in Multi-Agent Settings under Partially Observable Environments

Zhaikhan, Ainur, Khammassi, Malek, Sayed, Ali H.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work leverages adaptive social learning to estimate partially observable global states in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach enables the concurrent operation of social learning and reinforcement learning. Specifically, it alternates between a single step of social learning and a single step of MARL, eliminating the need for the time- and computation-intensive two-timescale learning frameworks. Theoretical guarantees are provided to support the effectiveness of the proposed method. Simulation results verify that the performance of the proposed methodology can approach that of reinforcement learning when the true state is known.


Dynamic Sight Range Selection in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Liao, Wei-Chen, Wu, Ti-Rong, Wu, I-Chen

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-agent reinforcement Learning (MARL) is often challenged by the sight range dilemma, where agents either receive insufficient or excessive information from their environment. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Dynamic Sight Range Selection (DSR), to address this issue. DSR utilizes an Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm and dynamically adjusts the sight range during training. Experiment results show several advantages of using DSR. First, we demonstrate using DSR achieves better performance in three common MARL environments, including Level-Based Foraging (LBF), Multi-Robot Warehouse (RWARE), and StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC). Second, our results show that DSR consistently improves performance across multiple MARL algorithms, including QMIX and MAPPO. Third, DSR offers suitable sight ranges for different training steps, thereby accelerating the training process. Finally, DSR provides additional interpretability by indicating the optimal sight range used during training. Unlike existing methods that rely on global information or communication mechanisms, our approach operates solely based on the individual sight ranges of agents. This approach offers a practical and efficient solution to the sight range dilemma, making it broadly applicable to real-world complex environments.


A Generative Model Enhanced Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Method for Electric Vehicle Charging Navigation

Qi, Tianyang, Chen, Shibo, Zhang, Jun

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), navigating for EV drivers to select a cost-effective charging station has become an important yet challenging issue due to dynamic traffic conditions, fluctuating electricity prices, and potential competition from other EVs. The state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms for solving this task still require global information about all EVs at the execution stage, which not only increases communication costs but also raises privacy issues among EV drivers. To overcome these drawbacks, we introduce a novel generative model-enhanced multi-agent DRL algorithm that utilizes only the EV's local information while achieving performance comparable to these state-of-the-art algorithms. Specifically, the policy network is implemented on the EV side, and a Conditional Variational Autoencoder-Long Short Term Memory (CVAE-LSTM)-based recommendation model is developed to provide recommendation information. Furthermore, a novel future charging competition encoder is designed to effectively compress global information, enhancing training performance. The multi-gradient descent algorithm (MGDA) is also utilized to adaptively balance the weight between the two parts of the training objective, resulting in a more stable training process. Simulations are conducted based on a practical area in Xi\'an, China. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm, which relies on local information, outperforms existing local information-based methods and achieves less than 8\% performance loss compared to global information-based methods.


PAGNet: Pluggable Adaptive Generative Networks for Information Completion in Multi-Agent Communication

Zhang, Zhuohui, Cheng, Bin, Wang, Zhipeng, Zhou, Yanmin, Li, Gang, Lu, Ping, He, Bin, Chen, Jie

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

For partially observable cooperative tasks, multi-agent systems must develop effective communication and understand the interplay among agents in order to achieve cooperative goals. However, existing multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with communication methods lack evaluation metrics for information weights and information-level communication modeling. This causes agents to neglect the aggregation of multiple messages, thereby significantly reducing policy learning efficiency. In this paper, we propose pluggable adaptive generative networks (PAGNet), a novel framework that integrates generative models into MARL to enhance communication and decision-making. PAGNet enables agents to synthesize global states representations from weighted local observations and use these representations alongside learned communication weights for coordinated decision-making. This pluggable approach reduces the computational demands typically associated with the joint training of communication and policy networks. Extensive experimental evaluations across diverse benchmarks and communication scenarios demonstrate the significant performance improvements achieved by PAGNet. Furthermore, we analyze the emergent communication patterns and the quality of generated global states, providing insights into operational mechanisms.