Sparse rewards are one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, these challenges have been addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of their state spaces. Applying these techniques naively to the multi-agent setting results in individual agents exploring independently, without any coordination among themselves. We argue that learning in cooperative multi-agent settings can be accelerated and improved if agents coordinate with respect to what they have explored. In this paper we propose an approach for learning how to dynamically select between different types of intrinsic rewards which consider not just what an individual agent has explored, but all agents, such that the agents can coordinate their exploration and maximize extrinsic returns. Concretely, we formulate the approach as a hierarchical policy where a high-level controller selects among sets of policies trained on different types of intrinsic rewards and the low-level controllers learn the action policies of all agents under these specific rewards. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a multi-agent learning domain with sparse rewards.

该论文介绍了一种为多智能体设计内在奖励的框架，以促进协调探索，然后开发了一种方法来学习如何动态选择若干探索方式以最大化外在奖励。通过在具有稀疏奖励的合作域和需要改变协调模式的具有挑战性的多阶段任务中进行实验证明了该方法的有效性。

多智能体强化学习中基于内在奖励的协调探索