Reinforcement Learning with Task Decomposition for Cooperative Multiagent Systems

In this article, we study cooperative multiagent systems (MASs) with multiple tasks by using reinforcement learning (RL)-based algorithms. The target for a single-agent RL system is represented by its scalar reward signals. However, for an MAS with multiple cooperative tasks, the holistic reward signal consists of multiple parts to represent the tasks, which makes the problem complicated. Existing multiagent RL algorithms search distributed policies with holistic reward signals directly, making it difficult to obtain an optimal policy for each task. This article provides efficient learning-based algorithms such that each agent can learn a joint optimal policy to accomplish these multiple tasks cooperatively with other agents. The main idea of the algorithms is to decompose the holistic reward signal for each agent into multiple parts according to the subtasks, and then the proposed algorithms learn multiple value functions with the decomposed reward signals and update the policy with the sum of distributed value functions. In addition, this article presents a theoretical analysis of the proposed approach. Finally, the simulation results for both discrete decision-making and continuous control problems have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.