A Deep Policy Inference Q-Network for Multi-Agent Systems
  We present DPIQN, a deep policy inference Q-network that targets multi-agent
systems composed of controllable agents, collaborators, and opponents that
interact with each other. We focus on one challenging issue in such
systems---modeling agents with varying strategies---and propose to employ
"policy features" learned from raw observations (e.g., raw images) of
collaborators and opponents by inferring their policies. DPIQN incorporates the
learned policy features as a hidden vector into its own deep Q-network (DQN),
such that it is able to predict better Q values for the controllable agents
than the state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning models. We further
propose an enhanced version of DPIQN, called deep recurrent policy inference
Q-network (DRPIQN), for handling partial observability. Both DPIQN and DRPIQN
are trained by an adaptive training procedure, which adjusts the network's
attention to learn the policy features and its own Q-values at different phases
of the training process. We present a comprehensive analysis of DPIQN and
DRPIQN, and highlight their effectiveness and generalizability in various
multi-agent settings. Our models are evaluated in a classic soccer game
involving both competitive and collaborative scenarios. Experimental results
performed on 1 vs. 1 and 2 vs. 2 games show that DPIQN and DRPIQN demonstrate
superior performance to the baseline DQN and deep recurrent Q-network (DRQN)
models. We also explore scenarios in which collaborators or opponents
dynamically change their policies, and show that DPIQN and DRPIQN do lead to
better overall performance in terms of stability and mean scores.
