Shared Experience Actor Critic for Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning
Exploration in multi agent reinforcement learning is a challenging problem, especially in environments with sparse rewards. We propose a general method for efficient exploration by sharing experience amongst agents. Our proposed algorithm, called Shared Experience Actor Critic (SEAC) applies experience sharing in an actor critic framework. We evaluate SEAC in a collection of sparse reward multi agent environments and find that it consistently outperforms two baselines and two state of the art algorithms by learning in fewer steps and converging to higher returns. In some harder environments, experience sharing makes the difference between learning to solve the task and not learning at all.
NeurIPS