Backpropagation Through Agents

A fundamental challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is to learn the joint policy in an extremely large search space, which grows exponentially with the number of agents. Moreover, fully decentralized policy factorization significantly restricts the search space, which may lead to sub-optimal policies. In contrast, the auto-regressive joint policy can represent a much richer class of joint policies by factorizing the joint policy into the product of a series of conditional individual policies. While such factorization introduces the action dependency among agents explicitly in sequential execution, it does not take full advantage of the dependency during learning. In particular, the subsequent agents do not give the preceding agents feedback about their decisions. In this paper, we propose a new framework Back-Propagation Through Agents (BPTA) that directly accounts for both agents' own policy updates and the learning of their dependent counterparts. This is achieved by propagating the feedback through action chains. With the proposed framework, our Bidirectional Proximal Policy Optimisation (BPPO) outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on matrix games, StarCraftII v2, Multi-agent MuJoCo, and Google Research Football demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.