Multi-Agent Policy Transfer via Task Relationship Modeling

Team adaptation to new cooperative tasks is a hallmark of human intelligence, which has yet to be fully realized in learning agents. Previous works on multi-agent transfer learning accommodate teams of different sizes, but heavily rely on the generalization ability of neural networks for adapting to unseen tasks. We posit that the relationship among tasks provides the key information for policy adaptation. To utilize such relationship for efficient transfer, we try to discover and exploit the knowledge among tasks from different teams, propose to learn effect-based task representations as a common latent space among tasks, and use it to build an alternatively fixed training scheme. We demonstrate that the task representation can capture the relationship among teams and generalize to unseen tasks. As a result, the proposed method can help transfer learned cooperation knowledge to new tasks after training on a few source tasks, and the learned transferred policies can also help solve tasks that are hard to learn from scratch.