Learning when to Communicate at Scale in Multiagent Cooperative and Competitive Tasks

TL;DR

This paper introduces IC3Net, a scalable multi-agent communication model that learns when to communicate effectively in cooperative, semi-cooperative, and competitive tasks, improving performance and convergence.

Contribution

IC3Net is a novel model that controls continuous communication with gating and individualized rewards, enhancing training efficiency and scalability across diverse multi-agent scenarios.

Findings

IC3Net outperforms baselines in StarCraft scenarios.

Agents learn scenario-dependent communication strategies.

Improved convergence rates with increasing scale.

Abstract

Learning when to communicate and doing that effectively is essential in multi-agent tasks. Recent works show that continuous communication allows efficient training with back-propagation in multi-agent scenarios, but have been restricted to fully-cooperative tasks. In this paper, we present Individualized Controlled Continuous Communication Model (IC3Net) which has better training efficiency than simple continuous communication model, and can be applied to semi-cooperative and competitive settings along with the cooperative settings. IC3Net controls continuous communication with a gating mechanism and uses individualized rewards foreach agent to gain better performance and scalability while fixing credit assignment issues. Using variety of tasks including StarCraft BroodWars explore and combat scenarios, we show that our network yields improved performance and convergence rates than the baselines as the scale increases. Our results convey that IC3Net agents learn when to communicate based on the scenario and profitability.