Knowledge Injection for Multiagent Systems via Counterfactual Perception Shaping
Nicholas Zerbel, Kagan Tumer · Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications · 2023
Reward shaping can be used to train coordinated agent teams, but most learning approaches optimize for training conditions and by design, are limited by knowledge directly captured by the reward function. Advances in adaptive systems (e.g., transfer learning) may enable agents to quickly learn new policies in response to changing conditions, but retraining agents is both difficult and risks losing team coordination altogether. In this work we introduce Counterfactual Knowledge Injection (CKI), a novel approach to injecting high-level information into a multiagent system outside of the learning process. CKI encodes knowledge into counterfactual state representations to shape agent perceptions of the system so that their current policies better match the current system conditions. We demonstrate CKI in a multiagent exploration task where agents must collaborate to observe various Points of Interest (POI). We show that CKI successfully imparts high-level system knowledge to agents in response to imperceptible changes. We also show that CKI enables agents to adjust their level of agent-to-agent coordination ranging from tasks individuals can complete up to tasks that require the entire team.