Effective Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Control With Relative Entropy Regularization

This paper focused on developing an effective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach that quickly explores optimal control policies of multiple agents through interactions with unknown environments. Multi-Agent Continuous Dynamic Policy Gradient (MACDPP) was proposed to tackle the issues of limited capability and sample efficiency in the current MARL approaches. It alleviates the inconsistency of multiple agents’ policy updates by introducing the relative entropy regularization to the Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) framework with the Actor-Critic (AC) structure. Evaluated by multi-agent cooperation and competition tasks and traditional control tasks including OpenAI benchmarks and robot arm manipulation, MACDPP demonstrates its significant superiority in learning capability and sample efficiency compared with both related multi-agent and widely implemented signal-agent baselines. It converges to
$62\%$
higher average return and uses
$38\%$
fewer samples compared with the suboptimal baseline over all tasks, indicating the potential of MARL in challenging control scenarios, especially when the number of interactions is limited. The open source code of MACDPP is available at https://github.com/AdrienLin1/MACDPP.
Note to Practitioners
—Learning proper cooperation strategy over multiple agents in complicated systems has been a challenge in the domain of Reinforcement Learning. Our work extends the traditional MARL approach FKDPP that has been successfully implemented in the real-world chemical plant by Yokogawa to the CTDE framework and AC structure that supports continuous actions. This extension significantly expands its range of applications from cooperative/competitive tasks to the joint control of one complex system while maintaining its effectiveness.