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Decentralized Multiagent Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Robotic Control by Coordination Graphs

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PRICAI 2018: Trends in Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2018)

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Abstract

Reinforcement learning is widely used to learn complex behaviors for robotics. However, due to the high-dimensional state/action spaces, reinforcement learning usually suffers from slow learning speed in robotic control applications. A feasible solution to this challenge is to utilize structural decomposition of the control problem and resort to decentralized learning methods to expedite the overall learning process. In this paper, a multiagent reinforcement learning approach is proposed to enable decentralized learning of component behaviors for a robot that is decomposed as a coordination graph. By using this approach, all the component behaviors are learned in parallel by some individual reinforcement learning agents and these agents coordinate their behaviors to solve the global control problem. The approach is validated and analyzed in two benchmark robotic control problems. The experimental validation provides evidence that the proposed approach enables better performance than approaches without decomposition.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61502072, 61572104 and 61403059, Hongkong Scholar Program under Grant XJ2017028, and Dalian High Level Talent Innovation Support Program under Grant 2017RQ008.

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Correspondence to Chao Yu .

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Yu, C., Wang, D., Ren, J., Ge, H., Sun, L. (2018). Decentralized Multiagent Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Robotic Control by Coordination Graphs. In: Geng, X., Kang, BH. (eds) PRICAI 2018: Trends in Artificial Intelligence. PRICAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11012. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97304-3_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97304-3_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97303-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97304-3

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