SeqComm are guaranteed to improve monotonically and converge.

The partial observability and stochasticity in multi-agent settings can be mitigated by accessing more information about others via communication. However, the coordination problem still exists since agents cannot communicate actual actions with each other at the same time due to the circular dependencies. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-level communication scheme, Sequential Communication (SeqComm). SeqComm treats agents asynchronously (the upper-level agents make decisions before the lower-level ones) and has two communication phases. In the negotiation phase, agents determine the priority of decision-making by communicating hidden states of observations and comparing the value of intention, which is obtained by modeling the environment dynamics. In the launching phase, the upper-level agents take the lead in making decisions and then communicate their actions with the lower-level agents. Theoretically, we prove the policies learned by SeqComm are guaranteed to improve monotonically and converge. Empirically, we show that SeqComm outperforms existing methods in a variety of cooperative multi-agent tasks.

The partial observability and stochasticity in multi-agent settings can be mitigated by accessing more information about others via communication. However, the coordination problem still exists since agents cannot communicate actual actions with each other at the same time due to the circular dependencies. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-level communication scheme, Sequential Communication (SeqComm). SeqComm treats agents asynchronously (the upper-level agents make decisions before the lower-level ones) and has two communication phases. In the negotiation phase, agents determine the priority of decision-making by communicating hidden states of observations and comparing the value of intention, which is obtained by modeling the environment dynamics.

Communication helps agents to obtain information about others so that better coordinated behavior can be learned. Some existing work communicates predicted future trajectory with others, hoping to get clues about what others would do for better coordination. However, circular dependencies sometimes can occur when agents are treated synchronously so it is hard to coordinate decision-making. In this paper, we propose a novel communication scheme, Sequential Communication (SeqComm). SeqComm treats agents asynchronously (the upper-level agents make decisions before the lower-level ones) and has two communication phases. In negotiation phase, agents determine the priority of decision-making by communicating hidden states of observations and comparing the value of intention, which is obtained by modeling the environment dynamics. In launching phase, the upper-level agents take the lead in making decisions and communicate their actions with the lower-level agents. Theoretically, we prove the policies learned by SeqComm are guaranteed to improve monotonically and converge. Empirically, we show that SeqComm outperforms existing methods in various multi-agent cooperative tasks.