Decentralized Communication Strategies for Coordinated Multi-Agent Policies

Abstract

Although the presence of free communication reduces the complexity of multi-agent POMDPs to that of single-agent POMDPs, in practice, communication is not free and reducing the amount of communication is often desirable. We present a novel approach for using centralized "single-agent" policies in decentralized multi-agent systems by maintaining and reasoning over the possible joint beliefs of the team. We describe how communication is used to integrate local observations into the team belief as needed to improve performance. We show both experimentally and through a detailed example how our approach reduces communication while improving the performance of distributed execution.