Contextual Bandit Learning With Reward Oracles and Sampling Guidance in Multi-Agent Environments

Learning action policy for autonomous agents in a decentralized multi-agent environment has remained an interesting but difficult research problem. We propose to model this problem in a contextual bandit setting with delayed reward signals, in particular an individual short-term reward signal and a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mike Li, Quang Dang Nguyen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9474507/
Description
Summary:Learning action policy for autonomous agents in a decentralized multi-agent environment has remained an interesting but difficult research problem. We propose to model this problem in a contextual bandit setting with delayed reward signals, in particular an individual short-term reward signal and a shared long-term reward signal. Our algorithm utilizes an approach with reward oracles to directly model these delayed reward signals and also relies on a learning scheme benefiting from the sampling guidance of an expert-designed policy. This algorithm is expected to apply to a wide range of problems, including those with constraints on accessing state transitions and those with implicit reward information. A demonstration, deployed by deep learning regressors, shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in learning offensive action policy in the RoboCup Soccer 2D Simulation (RCSS) environment against a well-known adversary benchmark team compared to a baseline policy.
ISSN:2169-3536