Non-Reciprocating Sharing Methods in Cooperative Q-Learning Environments

Past research on multi-agent simulation with cooperative reinforcement learning (RL) for homogeneous agents focuses on developing sharing strategies that are adopted and used by all agents in the environment. These sharing strategies are considered to be reciprocating because all participating agents have a predefined agreement regarding what type of information is shared, when it is shared, and how the participating agent's policies are subsequently updated. The sharing strategies are specifically designed around manipulating this shared information to improve learning performance. This thesis targets situations where the assumption of a single sharing strategy that is employed by all agents is not valid. This work seeks to address how agents with no predetermined sharing partners can exploit groups of cooperatively learning agents to improve learning performance when compared to Independent learning. Specifically, several intra-agent methods are proposed that do not assume a reciprocating sharing relationship and leverage the pre-existing agent interface associated with Q-Learning to expedite learning. The other agents' functions and their sharing strategies are unknown and inaccessible from the point of view of the agent(s) using the proposed methods. The proposed methods are evaluated on physically embodied agents in the multi-agent cooperative robotics field learning a navigation task via simulation. The experiments conducted focus on the effects of the following factors on the performance of the proposed non-reciprocating methods: scaling the number of agents in the environment, limiting the communication range of the agents, and scaling the size of the environment.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science and Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science and Applications

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Cunningham, Bryan

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Cao, Yong

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Kavanaugh, Andrea L.
• Cao, Yang

• Information Exchanges in Multi-Agent Systems
• Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
• Agent Interaction Protocols
• Cooperative Learning

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-08172012-110113

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/34610