Multi-Agent Cognition Difference Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent Cooperation

Multi-agent cooperation is one of the most attractive research fields in multi-agent systems. There are many attempts made by researchers in this field to promote the cooperation behavior. However, in partially-observable environments, a large number of agents and complex interactions among the agents cause huge difficulty for policy learning. Moreover, redundant communication contents caused by many agents make effective features hard to be extracted, which prevents the policy from converging. To address the limitations above, a novel method called multi-agent cognition difference reinforcement learning (MACD-RL) is proposed in this paper. The key feature of MACD-RL lies in cognition difference network (CDN) and a soft communication network (SCN). CDN is designed to allow each agent to choose its neighbors (communication targets) adaptively with its environment cognition difference. SCN is designed to handle the complex interactions among the agents with soft attention mechanism. The results of simulations including mixed cooperative and competitive tasks demonstrate that the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed model.