Recent successes of value-based multi-agent deep reinforcement learning employ optimism by limiting underestimation updates of value function estimator, through carefully controlled learning rate (, 2017) or reduced update probability (, 2018). To achieve full cooperation when learning independently, an agent must estimate the state values contingent on having optimal teammates; therefore, value overestimation is frequency injected to counteract negative effects caused by unobservable teammate sub-optimal policies and explorations. Aiming to solve this issue through automatic scheduling, this paper introduces a decentralized quantile estimator, which we found empirically to be more stable, sample efficient and more likely to converge to the joint optimal policy.
Many real-world tasks involve multiple agents with partial observability and limited communication. Learning is challenging in these settings due to local viewpoints of agents, which perceive the world as non-stationary due to concurrently-exploring teammates. Approaches that learn specialized policies for individual tasks face problems when applied to the real world: not only do agents have to learn and store distinct policies for each task, but in practice identities of tasks are often non-observable, making these approaches inapplicable. This paper formalizes and addresses the problem of multi-task multi-agent reinforcement learning under partial observability. We introduce a decentralized single-task learning approach that is robust to concurrent interactions of teammates, and present an approach for distilling single-task policies into a unified policy that performs well across multiple related tasks, without explicit provision of task identity.