PMAC: Personalized Multi-Agent Communication

Communication plays a crucial role in information sharing within the field of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, how to transmit information that meets individual needs remains a long-standing challenge. Some existing work focus on using a common channel for information transfer, which limits the capability for local communication. Meanwhile, other work attempt to establish peer-to-peer communication topologies but suffer from quadratic complexity. In this paper, we propose Personalized Multi-Agent Communication (PMAC), which enables the formation of peer-to-peer communication topologies, personalized message sending, and personalized message receiving. All these modules in PMAC are performed using only multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) with linear computational complexity. Empirically, we show the strength of personalized communication in a variety of cooperative scenarios. Our approach exhibits competitive performance compared to existing methods while maintaining notable computational efficiency.

Authors

• Xiangrui Meng School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University Key Laboratory of Machine Perceptron (MOE), Peking University
• Ying Tan School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University Key Laboratory of Machine Perceptron (MOE), Peking University Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University National Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence

Keywords

• MAS: Agent Communication
• MAS: Multiagent Learning
• ML: Reinforcement Learning