This Article 
   
 Share 
   
 Bibliographic References 
   
 Add to: 
 
Digg
Furl
Spurl
Blink
Simpy
Google
Del.icio.us
Y!MyWeb
 
 Search 
   
Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 3 (AAMAS'04)
Learning to Communicate and Act Using Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
New York City, New York, USA
July 19-July 23
ISBN: 0-7695-2092-8
Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Sridhar Mahadevan, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
In this paper, we address the issue of rational communication behavior among autonomous agents. The goal is for agents to learn a policy to optimize the communication needed for proper coordination, given the communication cost. We extend our previously reported cooperative hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) algorithm to include communication decisions and propose a new multiagent HRL algorithm, called COM-Cooperative HRL. In this algorithm, we define cooperative subtasks to be those subtasks in which coordination among agents significantly improves the performance of the overall task. Those levels of the hierarchy which include cooperative subtasks are called cooperation levels. Coordination skills among agents are learned faster by sharing information at the cooperation levels, rather than the level of primitive actions. We add a communication level to the hierarchical decomposition of the problem below each cooperation level. Before making a decision at a cooperative subtask, agents decide if it is worthwhile to perform a communication action. A communication action has a certain cost and provides each agent at a certain cooperation level with the actions selected by the other agents at the same level. We demonstrate the efficacy of the COM-Cooperative HRL algorithm as well as the relation between the communication cost and the learned communication policy using a multiagent taxi domain.
Citation:
Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Sridhar Mahadevan, "Learning to Communicate and Act Using Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning," aamas, vol. 3, pp.1114-1121, Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 3 (AAMAS'04), 2004
Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use.