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From Few to More: Large-Scale Dynamic Multiagent Curriculum Learning (arxiv.org)
3 points by sel1 on Sep 10, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Agents first learn to coordinate with a few teammates, then the team grows step by step, using a network that accepts any number of agents and carries skills between stages. It beat the usual approach of training at full team size from the start.

Abstract · From Few to More: Large-scale Dynamic Multiagent Curriculum Learning

A lot of efforts have been devoted to investigating how agents can learn effectively and achieve coordination in multiagent systems. However, it is still challenging in large-scale multiagent settings due to the complex dynamics between the environment and agents and the explosion of state-action space. In this paper, we design a novel Dynamic Multiagent Curriculum Learning (DyMA-CL) to solve large-scale problems by starting from learning on a multiagent scenario with a small size and progressively increasing the number of agents. We propose three transfer mechanisms across curricula to accelerate the learning process. Moreover, due to the fact that the state dimension varies across curricula,, and existing network structures cannot be applied in such a transfer setting since their network input sizes are fixed. Therefore, we design a novel network structure called Dynamic Agent-number Network (DyAN) to handle the dynamic size of the network input. Experimental results show that DyMA-CL using DyAN greatly improves the performance of large-scale multiagent learning compared with state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning approaches. We also investigate the influence of three transfer mechanisms across curricula through extensive simulations.

Weixun Wang, Tianpei Yang, Yong Liu, Jianye Hao, Xiaotian Hao, Yujing Hu, Yingfeng Chen, Changjie Fan, Yang Gao
arXiv:1909.02790 · cs.AI, cs.MA · submitted Sep 6, 2019 · updated Nov 20, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted by AAAI2020

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