Differential Advising in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning

Agent advising is one of the main approaches to improve agent learning performance by enabling agents to share advice. Existing advising methods have a common limitation that an adviser agent can offer advice to an advisee agent only if the advice is created in the same state as the advisee's state. However, in complex environments, it is a very strong requirement that two states are the same, because a state may consist of multiple dimensions and two states being the same means that all these dimensions in the two states are correspondingly identical. Therefore, this requirement may limit the applicability of existing advising methods to complex environments. In this article, inspired by the differential privacy scheme, we propose a differential advising method that relaxes this requirement by enabling agents to use advice in a state even if the advice is created in a slightly different state. Compared with the existing methods, agents using the proposed method have more opportunity to take advice from others. This article is the first to adopt the concept of differential privacy on advising to improve agent learning performance instead of addressing security issues. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is more efficient in complex environments than the existing methods.