Effective communication protocols in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) are critical to fostering cooperation and enhancing team performance. To leverage communication, many previous works have proposed to compress local information into a single message and broadcast it to all reachable agents. This simplistic messaging mechanism, however, may fail to provide adequate, critical, and relevant information to individual agents, especially in severely bandwidth-limited scenarios. This motivates us to develop context-aware communication schemes for MARL, aiming to deliver personalized messages to different agents. Our communication protocol, named CACOM, consists of two stages. In the first stage, agents exchange coarse representations in a broadcast fashion, providing context for the second stage. Following this, agents utilize attention mechanisms in the second stage to selectively generate messages personalized for the receivers. Furthermore, we employ the learned step size quantization (LSQ) technique for message quantization to reduce the communication overhead. To evaluate the effectiveness of CACOM, we integrate it with both actor-critic and value-based MARL algorithms. Empirical results on cooperative benchmark tasks demonstrate that CACOM provides evident performance gains over baselines under communication-constrained scenarios.

开发名为CACOM的上下文感知通信协议，通过多个阶段的粗略表示交换和注意机制，为多智能体强化学习提供了个性化的通信方案，采用学习的步长量化技术以减少通信开销，并在合作基准任务上实验结果证明CACOM在通信受限场景下提供了明显的性能提升。

多智能体强化学习的上下文感知通信