Multi-agent double deep Q-networks

Abstract

There are many open issues and challenges in the multi-agent reward-based learning field. Theoretical convergence guarantees are lost, and the complexity of the action-space is also exponential to the amount of agents calculating their optimal joint-action. Function approximators, such as deep neural networks, have successfully been used in single-agent environments with high dimensional state-spaces. We propose the Multi-agent Double Deep Q-Networks algorithm, an extension of Deep Q-Networks to the multi-agent paradigm. Two common techniques of multi-agent Q-learning are used to formally describe our proposal, and are tested in a Foraging Task and a Pursuit Game. We also demonstrate how they can generalize to similar tasks and to larger teams, due to the strength of deep-learning techniques, and their viability for transfer learning approaches. With only a small fraction of the initial task’s training, we adapt to longer tasks, and we accelerate the task completion by increasing the team size, thus empirically demonstrating a solution to the complexity issues of the multi-agent field.