HiMacMic: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning with Dynamic Asynchronous Macro Strategy

Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) has been widely used in many scenarios such as robotics and game AI. However, existing methods mainly focus on the optimization of agents' micro policies without considering the macro strategy. As a result, they cannot perform well in complex or sparse reward scenarios like the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) and Google Research Football (GRF). To this end, we propose a hierarchical MADRL framework called "HiMacMic" with dynamic asynchronous macro strategy. Spatially, HiMacMic determines a critical position by using a positional heat map. Temporally, the macro strategy dynamically decides its deadline and updates it asynchronously among agents. We validate HiMacMic in four widely used benchmarks, namely: Overcooked, GRF, SMAC and SMAC-v2 with nine chosen scenarios. Results show that HiMacMic not only converges faster and achieves higher results than ten existing approaches, but also shows its adaptability to different environment settings.