Mean Field Games Flock! The Reinforcement Learning Way

Mean Field Games Flock! The Reinforcement Learning Way

Sarah Perrin, Mathieu Laurière, Julien Pérolat, Matthieu Geist, Romuald Élie, Olivier Pietquin

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 356-362. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/50

We present a method enabling a large number of agents to learn how to flock. This problem has drawn a lot of interest but requires many structural assumptions and is tractable only in small dimensions. We phrase this problem as a Mean Field Game (MFG), where each individual chooses its own acceleration depending on the population behavior. Combining Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Normalizing Flows (NF), we obtain a tractable solution requiring only very weak assumptions. Our algorithm finds a Nash Equilibrium and the agents adapt their velocity to match the neighboring flock’s average one. We use Fictitious Play and alternate: (1) computing an approximate best response with Deep RL, and (2) estimating the next population distribution with NF. We show numerically that our algorithm can learn multi-group or high-dimensional flocking with obstacles.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Multi-agent Learning
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Noncooperative Games
Machine Learning Applications: Applications of Reinforcement Learning