2024/05/23 by Matteo Bettini, Ryan Kortvelesy, Bettini, Matteo +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Innovation Diffusion and Forecasting #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) #Reinforcement Learning in Robotics #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.15054
openalex publication_date 2024/05/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The study of behavioral diversity in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a nascent yet promising field. In this context, the present work deals with the question of how to control the diversity of a multi-agent system. With no existing approaches to control diversity to a set value, current solutions focus on blindly promoting it via intrinsic rewards or additional loss functions, effectively changing the learning objective and lacking a principled measure for it. To address this, we introduce Diversity Control (DiCo), a method able to control diversity to an exact value of a given metric by representing policies as the sum of a parameter-shared component and dynamically scaled per-agent components. By applying constraints directly to the policy architecture, DiCo leaves the learning objective unchanged, enabling its applicability to any actor-critic MARL algorithm. We theoretically prove that DiCo achieves the desired diversity, and we provide several experiments, both in cooperative and competitive tasks, that show how DiCo can be employed as a novel paradigm to increase performance and sample efficiency in MARL. Multimedia results are available on the paper's website: https://sites.google.com/view/dico-marl.