Enhancing Multi-Agent Cooperation Through Action-Probability-Based Communication

Abstract

Although communication plays a pivotal role in achieving coordinated activities in multi-agent systems, conventional approaches often involve complicated high-dimensional messages generated by deep networks. These messages are typically indecipherable to humans, are relatively costly to transmit, and require intricate encoding and decoding networks. This can pose a design limitation for the agents such as autonomous (mobile) robots. This lack of interpretability can lead to systemic issues with security and reliability. In this study, inspired by common human communication about likely actions in collaborative endeavors, we propose a novel approach in which each agent’s action probabilities are transmitted to other agents as messages, drawing inspiration from the common human practice of sharing likely actions in collaborative endeavors. Our proposed framework is referred to as communication based on action probabilities (CAP), and focuses on generating straightforward, low-dimensional, interpretable messages to support multiple agents in coordinating their activities to achieve specified cooperative goals. CAP streamlines our comprehension of the agents’ learned coordinated and cooperative behaviors and eliminates the need to use additional network models to generate messages. CAP’s network architecture is simpler than that of state-of-the-art methods, and our experimental results show that it nonetheless performed comparably, converged faster, and exhibited a lower volume of communication with better interpretability.