Attention-Guided Contrastive Role Representations for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Real-world multi-agent tasks usually involve dynamic team composition with the emergence of roles, which should also be a key to efficient cooperation in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Drawing inspiration from the correlation between roles and agent's behavior patterns, we propose a novel framework of Attention-guided COntrastive Role representation learning for MARL (ACORM) to promote behavior heterogeneity, knowledge transfer, and skillful coordination across agents. First, we introduce mutual information maximization to formalize role representation learning, derive a contrastive learning objective, and concisely approximate the distribution of negative pairs. Second, we leverage an attention mechanism to prompt the global state to attend to learned role representations in value decomposition, implicitly guiding agent coordination in a skillful role space to yield more expressive credit assignment. Experiments on challenging StarCraft II micromanagement and Google research football tasks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method and its advantages over existing approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJU-RL/ACORM . * Corresponding author. 1 Taking the football game (Kurach et al., 2020) as an example, the midfielders are primarily responsible for delivering the ball to the forwards to coordinate shots on goal in the offensive phase, while they need to drop back and join the defenders to block passing lanes on the defensive.