UPDeT: Universal Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning via Policy Decoupling with Transformers

TL;DR

UPDeT introduces a transformer-based universal architecture for multi-agent reinforcement learning, enabling flexible, transferable policies across diverse tasks with improved performance and training efficiency.

Contribution

This work pioneers a universal multi-agent RL pipeline using a transformer-based policy decoupling approach, enhancing generalization and transferability across various multi-agent tasks.

Findings

Achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

Enables multi-task learning with strong transfer capabilities.

Speeds up training by a factor of 10.

Abstract

Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning have been largely limited in training one model from scratch for every new task. The limitation is due to the restricted model architecture related to fixed input and output dimensions. This hinders the experience accumulation and transfer of the learned agent over tasks with diverse levels of difficulty (e.g. 3 vs 3 or 5 vs 6 multi-agent games). In this paper, we make the first attempt to explore a universal multi-agent reinforcement learning pipeline, designing one single architecture to fit tasks with the requirement of different observation and action configurations. Unlike previous RNN-based models, we utilize a transformer-based model to generate a flexible policy by decoupling the policy distribution from the intertwined input observation with an importance weight measured by the merits of the self-attention mechanism. Compared to a standard transformer block, the proposed model, named as Universal Policy Decoupling Transformer (UPDeT), further relaxes the action restriction and makes the multi-agent task's decision process more explainable. UPDeT is general enough to be plugged into any multi-agent reinforcement learning pipeline and equip them with strong generalization abilities that enables the handling of multiple tasks at a time. Extensive experiments on large-scale SMAC multi-agent competitive games demonstrate that the proposed UPDeT-based multi-agent reinforcement learning achieves significant results relative to state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating advantageous transfer capability in terms of both performance and training speed (10 times faster).