Venue
- IJCAI-2020
Date
- 2021
Share
A Penny for Your Thoughts: The Value of Communication in Ad Hoc Teamwork
Reuth Mirsky*
William Macke*
Andy Wang*
Harel Yedidsion*
* External authors
IJCAI-2020
2021
Abstract
In ad hoc teamwork, multiple agents need to collaborate without having knowledge about their teammates or their plans a priori. A common assumption in this research area is that the agents cannot communicate. However, just as two random people may speak the same language, autonomous teammates may also happen to share a communication protocol. This paper considers how such a shared protocol can be leveraged, introducing a means to reason about Communication in Ad Hoc Teamwork (CAT). The goal of this work is enabling improved ad hoc teamwork by judiciously leveraging the ability of the team to communicate. We situate our study within a novel CAT scenario, involving tasks with multiple steps, where teammates' plans are unveiled over time. In this context, the paper proposes methods to reason about the timing and value of communication and introduces an algorithm for an ad hoc agent to leverage these methods. Finally, we introduces a new multiagent domain, the tool fetching domain, and we study how varying this domain's properties affects the usefulness of communication. Empirical results show the benefits of explicit reasoning about communication content and timing in ad hoc teamwork.
Related Publications
Current approaches to learning cooperative multi-agent behaviors assume relatively restrictive settings. In standard fully cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, the learning algorithm controls all agents in the scenario, while in ad hoc teamwork, the learning algor…
The ability to approach the same problem from different angles is a cornerstone of human intelligence that leads to robust solutions and effective adaptation to problem variations. In contrast, current RL methodologies tend to lead to policies that settle on a single solutio…
Racing autonomous cars faster than the best human drivers has been a longstanding grand challenge for the fields of Artificial Intelligence and robotics. Recently, an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning agent met this challenge in a high-fidelity racing simulator, Gran Tu…
JOIN US
Shape the Future of AI with Sony AI
We want to hear from those of you who have a strong desire
to shape the future of AI.
