Intrinsic Social Motivation via Causal Influence in Multi-Agent RL
Natasha Jaques
and
Angeliki Lazaridou
and
Edward Hughes
and
Caglar Gulcehre
and
Pedro A. Ortega
and
DJ Strouse
and
Joel Z. Leibo
and
Nando de Freitas
arXiv e-Print archive - 2018 via Local arXiv
Keywords:
cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.MA, stat.ML
First published: 2018/10/19 (6 years ago) Abstract: We derive a new intrinsic social motivation for multi-agent reinforcement
learning (MARL), in which agents are rewarded for having causal influence over
another agent's actions. Causal influence is assessed using counterfactual
reasoning. The reward does not depend on observing another agent's reward
function, and is thus a more realistic approach to MARL than taken in previous
work. We show that the causal influence reward is related to maximizing the
mutual information between agents' actions. We test the approach in challenging
social dilemma environments, where it consistently leads to enhanced
cooperation between agents and higher collective reward. Moreover, we find that
rewarding influence can lead agents to develop emergent communication
protocols. We therefore employ influence to train agents to use an explicit
communication channel, and find that it leads to more effective communication
and higher collective reward. Finally, we show that influence can be computed
by equipping each agent with an internal model that predicts the actions of
other agents. This allows the social influence reward to be computed without
the use of a centralised controller, and as such represents a significantly
more general and scalable inductive bias for MARL with independent agents.