2023/02/24 by Xuefeng Wang, Xinran Li, Wang, Xuefeng +5 · 3 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Memory and Neural Computing #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) #Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2302.12515
openalex publication_date 2023/02/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Learning communication strategies in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently attracted intensive attention. Early studies typically assumed a fully-connected communication topology among agents, which induces high communication costs and may not be feasible. Some recent works have developed adaptive communication strategies to reduce communication overhead, but these methods cannot effectively obtain valuable information from agents that are beyond the communication range. In this paper, we consider a realistic communication model where each agent has a limited communication range, and the communication topology dynamically changes. To facilitate effective agent communication, we propose a novel communication protocol called Adaptively Controlled Two-Hop Communication (AC2C). After an initial local communication round, AC2C employs an adaptive two-hop communication strategy to enable long-range information exchange among agents to boost performance, which is implemented by a communication controller. This controller determines whether each agent should ask for two-hop messages and thus helps to reduce the communication overhead during distributed execution. We evaluate AC2C on three cooperative multi-agent tasks, and the experimental results show that it outperforms relevant baselines with lower communication costs.