UPDET: Universal multi-agent reinforcement learning via policy decoupling with transformers

Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning have been largely limited training one model from scratch for every new task. This limitation occurs due to the restriction of the model architecture related to fixed input and output dimensions, which hinder the experience accumulation and transfer of the learned agent over tasks across diverse levels of difficulty (e.g. 3 vs 3 or 5 vs 6 multiagent games). In this paper, we make the first attempt to explore a universal multi-agent reinforcement learning pipeline, designing a single architecture to fit tasks with different observation and action configuration requirements. Unlike previous RNN-based models, we utilize a transformer-based model to generate a flexible policy by decoupling the policy distribution from the intertwined input observation, using an importance weight determined with the aid of the selfattention mechanism. Compared to a standard transformer block, the proposed model, which we name Universal Policy Decoupling Transformer (UPDeT), further relaxes the action restriction and makes the multi-agent task's decision process more explainable. UPDeT is general enough to be plugged into any multiagent reinforcement learning pipeline and equip it with strong generalization abilities that enable multiple tasks to be handled at a time. Extensive experiments on large-scale SMAC multi-agent competitive games demonstrate that the proposed UPDeT-based multi-agent reinforcement learning achieves significant improvements relative to state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating advantageous transfer capability in terms of both performance and training speed (10 times faster).