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Global Convergence of Localized Policy Iteration in Networked Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Published: 02 March 2023 Publication History

Abstract

We study a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problem where the agents interact over a given network. The goal of the agents is to cooperatively maximize the average of their entropy-regularized long-term rewards. To overcome the curse of dimensionality and to reduce communication, we propose a Localized Policy Iteration (LPI) algorithm that provably learns a near-globally-optimal policy using only local information. In particular, we show that, despite restricting each agent's attention to only its κ-hop neighborhood, the agents are able to learn a policy with an optimality gap that decays polynomially in κ. In addition, we show the finite-sample convergence of LPI to the global optimal policy, which explicitly captures the trade-off between optimality and computational complexity in choosing κ. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of LPI.

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        cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems
        Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems  Volume 7, Issue 1
        POMACS
        March 2023
        749 pages
        EISSN:2476-1249
        DOI:10.1145/3586099
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 02 March 2023
        Published in POMACS Volume 7, Issue 1

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        Author Tags

        1. distributed algorithms
        2. machine learning
        3. multi-agent reinforcement learning
        4. networked systems

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