Augmenting the action space with conventions to improve multi-agent cooperation in Hanabi

The card game Hanabi is considered a strong medium for the testing and development of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms, due to its cooperative nature, hidden information, limited communication and remarkable complexity. Previous research efforts have explored the capabilities of MARL algorithms within Hanabi, focusing largely on advanced architecture design and algorithmic manipulations to achieve state-of-the-art performance for a various number of cooperators. However, this often leads to complex solution strategies with high computational cost and requiring large amounts of training data. For humans to solve the Hanabi game effectively, they require the use of conventions, which often allows for a means to implicitly convey ideas or knowledge based on a predefined, and mutually agreed upon, set of ``rules''. Multi-agent problems containing partial observability, especially when limited communication is present, can benefit greatly from the use of implicit knowledge sharing. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to augmenting the action space using conventions, which act as special cooperative actions that span over multiple time steps and multiple agents, requiring agents to actively opt in for it to reach fruition. These conventions are based on existing human conventions, and result in a significant improvement on the performance of existing techniques for self-play and cross-play across a various number of cooperators within Hanabi.

Credit-cognisant reinforcement learning for multi-agent cooperation

Traditional multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms, such as independent Q-learning, struggle when presented with partially observable scenarios, and where agents are required to develop delicate action sequences. This is often the result of the reward for a good action only being available after other agents have taken theirs, and these actions are not credited accordingly. Recurrent neural networks have proven to be a viable solution strategy for solving these types of problems, resulting in significant performance increase when compared to other methods. In this paper, we explore a different approach and focus on the experiences used to update the action-value functions of each agent. We introduce the concept of credit-cognisant rewards (CCRs), which allows an agent to perceive the effect its actions had on the environment as well as on its co-agents. We show that by manipulating these experiences and constructing the reward contained within them to include the rewards received by all the agents within the same action sequence, we are able to improve significantly on the performance of independent deep Q-learning as well as deep recurrent Q-learning. We evaluate and test the performance of CCRs when applied to deep reinforcement learning techniques at the hands of a simplified version of the popular card game Hanabi.