Character-Based Value Factorization For MADRL

Abstract

Value factorization is a popular method for cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. In this method, agents generally have the same ability and rely only on individual value function to select actions, which is calculated from total environment reward. It ignores the impact of individual characteristics of heterogeneous agents on actions selection, which leads to the lack of pertinence during training and the increase of difficulty in learning effective policies. In order to stimulate individual awareness of heterogeneous agents and improve their learning efficiency and stability, we propose a novel value factorization method based on Personality Characteristics, PCQMIX, which assigns personality characteristics to each agent and takes them as internal rewards to train agents. As a result, PCQMIX can generate heterogeneous agents with specific personality characteristics suitable for specific scenarios. Experiments show that PCQMIX generates agents with stable personality characteristics and outperforms all baselines in multiple scenarios of the StarCraft II micromanagement task.