FoX: Formation-aware exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning

Understand

Recently, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has gained significant popularity due to its success in various cooperative multi-agent tasks.

• However, exploration still remains a challenging problem in MARL due to the partial observability of the agents and the exploration space that can grow exponentially as the number of agents increases.
• Firstly, in order to address the scalability issue of the exploration space, we define a formation-based equivalence relation on the exploration space and aim to reduce the search space by exploring only meaningful states in different formations.
• Then, we propose a novel formation-aware exploration (FoX) framework that encourages partially observable agents to visit the states in diverse formations by guiding them to be well aware of their current formation solely based on their own observations.