Learning to Communicate in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning : A Review
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
We consider the issue of multiple agents learning to communicate through reinforcement learning within partially observable environments, with a focus on information asymmetry in the second part of our work. We provide a review of the recent algorithms developed to improve the agents' policy by allowing the sharing of information between agents and the learning of communication strategies, with a focus on Deep Recurrent Q-Network-based models. We also describe recent efforts to interpret the languages generated by these agents and study their properties in an attempt to generate human-language-like sentences. We discuss the metrics used to evaluate the generated communication strategies and propose a novel entropy-based evaluation metric. Finally, we address the issue of the cost of communication and introduce the idea of an experimental setup to expose this cost in cooperative-competitive game.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2019.
Builds on
No reference list yet.
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 1; 2023: 2; 2024: 0; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.
6 papers.
- 2022A Survey of Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning with Communicationcited by 104
- 2023Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 33
- 2021HAMMER: Multi-Level Coordination of Reinforcement Learning Agents via Learned Messagingcited by 13
- 2026The Five Ws of Multi-Agent Communication: Who Talks to Whom, When, What, and Why -- A Survey from MARL to Emergent Language and LLMscited by 10
- 2023Efficient Communication via Self-supervised Information Aggregation for Online and Offline Multi-agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 2
- 2025Reducing Variance Caused by Communication in Decentralized Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
- 2026The Five Ws of Multi-Agent Communication: Who Talks to Whom, When, What, and Why -- A Survey from MARL to Emergent Language and LLMs12 Feb 2026
- 2025Reducing Variance Caused by Communication in Decentralized Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning10 Feb 2025
- 2023Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning: A Comprehensive Survey15 Dec 2023
- 2023Efficient Communication via Self-supervised Information Aggregation for Online and Offline Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning19 Feb 2023
- 2022A Survey of Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning with Communication16 Mar 2022
- 2021HAMMER: Multi-Level Coordination of Reinforcement Learning Agents via Learned Messaging18 Jan 2021