The exploitation of extra state information has been an active research area in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). QMIX represents the joint action-value using a non-negative function approximator and achieves the best performance on the StarCraft II micromanagement testbed, a common MARL benchmark. However, our experiments demonstrate that, in some cases, QMIX performs sub-optimally with the A2C framework, a training paradigm that promotes algorithm training efficiency. To obtain a reasonable trade-off between training efficiency and algorithm performance, we extend value-decomposition to actor-critic methods that are compatible with A2C and propose a novel actor-critic framework, value-decomposition actor-critic (VDAC). We evaluate VDAC on the StarCraft II micromanagement task and demonstrate that the proposed framework improves median performance over other actor-critic methods. Furthermore, we use a set of ablation experiments to identify the key factors that contribute to the performance of VDAC.
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Integrated Actor-Critic for Deep Reinforcement Learning
We propose a new deep deterministic actor-critic algorithm with an integrated network architecture and an integrated objective func- tion. We address stabilization of the learning procedure via a novel adap- tive objective that roughly ensures keeping the actor unchanged while the critic makes large errors. We reduce the number of network parame- ters and propose an improved exploration strategy over bounded action spaces. Moreover, we incorporate some recent advances in deep learn- ing to our algorithm. Experiments illustrate that our algorithm speeds up the learning process and reduces the sample complexity considerably over the state-of-the-art algorithms including TD3, SAC, PPO, and A2C in continuous control tasks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1954549
- PAR ID:
- 10333252
- Editor(s):
- I. Farkaˇs et al.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ICANN 2021
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 505–518
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The exploitation of extra state information has been an active research area in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). QMIX represents the joint action-value using a non-negative function approximator and achieves the best performance on the StarCraft II micromanagement testbed, a common MARL benchmark. However, our experiments demonstrate that, in some cases, QMIX performs sub-optimally with the A2C framework, a training paradigm that promotes algorithm training efficiency. To obtain a reasonable trade-off between training efficiency and algorithm performance, we extend value-decomposition to actor-critic methods that are compatible with A2C and propose a novel actor-critic framework, value-decomposition actor-critic (VDAC). We evaluate VDAC on the StarCraft II micromanagement task and demonstrate that the proposed framework improves median performance over other actor-critic methods. Furthermore, we use a set of ablation experiments to identify the key factors that contribute to the performance of VDAC.more » « less
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