Towards a Better Understanding of Learning with Multiagent Teams

Towards a Better Understanding of Learning with Multiagent Teams

David Radke, Kate Larson, Tim Brecht, Kyle Tilbury

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 271-279. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/31

While it has long been recognized that a team of individual learning agents can be greater than the sum of its parts, recent work has shown that larger teams are not necessarily more effective than smaller ones. In this paper, we study why and under which conditions certain team structures promote effective learning for a population of individual learning agents. We show that, depending on the environment, some team structures help agents learn to specialize into specific roles, resulting in more favorable global results. However, large teams create credit assignment challenges that reduce coordination, leading to large teams performing poorly compared to smaller ones. We support our conclusions with both theoretical analysis and empirical results.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Multi-agent learning
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Agent-based simulation and emergence
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Coordination and cooperation