Cognition-Driven Multiagent Policy Learning Framework for Promoting Cooperation
Zhiqiang Pu, Huimu Wang, Boyin Liu, Jianqiang Yi · IEEE Transactions on Games · 2022
Many attempts have been made to promote cooperation for multiagent systems. However, several issues that draw less attentions but may dramatically degrade the cooperation performance still exist, such as redundant information interactions among neighbors, and difficulties in understanding complex and dynamic environments from high-level cognition. To address these limitations, a cognition-driven multiagent policy (CDMAP) learning framework is proposed in this article. It includes a cognition difference network (CDN), a coupling cognition network (CCN), and a policy optimization network (PON). CDN is designed based on a variational autoencoder, where a concept of cognition difference is defined to prune redundant interactions among agents for more efficient communication. Based on the pruned topology, CCN captures the hidden representations of the surrounding environment. Several coupling graph attention layers are incorporated in CCN, each layer with different but coupling adjacent matrices, yielding a comprehensive state understanding from multiple representation spaces. Based on the captured hidden states, PON generates the final policies, where QMIX is adopted as a value factorization method to alleviate the credit-assignment problem. At last, CDMAP is evaluated through two representative multiagent games including Google Research Football andStarCraft II. The results demonstrate its superior effectiveness compared with existing methods.