Reinforcement learning for cooperative actions in a partially observable multi-agent system

Abstract

In this article, we apply a policy gradient-based reinforcement learning to allowing multiple agents to perform cooperative actions in a partially observable environment. We introduce an auxiliary state variable, an internal state, whose stochastic process is Markov, for extracting important features of multi-agent's dynamics. Computer simulations show that every agent can identify an appropriate internal state model and acquire a good policy; this approach is shown to be more effective than a traditional memory-based method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.