IQ-Flow: Mechanism Design for Inducing Cooperative Behavior to Self-Interested Agents in Sequential Social Dilemmas

  Paper

Abstract

Bengisu Guresti
Abdullah Vanlioglu
Nazim Kemal Ure


Achieving and maintaining cooperation between agents to accomplish a common objective is one of the central goals of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Nevertheless in many real-world scenarios, separately trained and specialized agents are deployed into a shared environment, or the environment requires multiple objectives to be achieved by different coexisting parties. These vari- ations among specialties and objectives are likely to cause mixed motives that eventually result in a social dilemma where all the parties are at a loss. In order to resolve this issue, we propose the Incentive Q-Flow (IQ-Flow) algorithm, which modifies the system’s reward setup with an incentive regulator agent such that the cooperative policy also corresponds to the self-interested policy for the agents. Unlike the existing methods that learn to incentivize self-interested agents, IQ-Flow does not make any assumptions about agents’ policies or learning algorithms, which enables the generalization of the developed framework to a wider array of ap- plications. IQ-Flow performs an offline evaluation of the optimality of the learned policies using the data provided by other agents to de- termine cooperative and self-interested policies. Next, IQ-Flow uses meta-gradient learning to estimate how policy evaluation changes according to given incentives and modifies the incentive such that the greedy policy for cooperative objective and self-interested objective yield the same actions. We present the operational characteristics of IQ-Flow in Iterated Matrix Games. We demonstrate that IQ-Flow outperforms the state-of-the-art incentive design al- gorithm in Escape Room and 2-Player Cleanup environments. We further demonstrate that the pretrained IQ-Flow mechanism significantly outperforms the performance of the shared reward setup in the 2-Player Cleanup environment.







Presentation






Acknowledgements

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