Graph Convolutional Value Decomposition in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

We propose a novel framework for value function factorization in multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL) using graph neural networks (GNNs). In particular, we consider the team of agents as the set of nodes of a complete directed graph, whose edge weights are governed by an attention mechanism. Building upon this underlying graph, we introduce a mixing GNN module, which is responsible for i) factorizing the team state-action value function into individual per-agent observation-action value functions, and ii) explicit credit assignment to each agent in terms of fractions of the global team reward. Our approach, which we call GraphMIX, follows the centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm, enabling the agents to make their decisions independently once training is completed. We show the superiority of GraphMIX as compared to the state-of-the-art on several scenarios in the StarCraft II multi-agent challenge (SMAC) benchmark. We further demonstrate how GraphMIX can be used in conjunction with a recent hierarchical MARL architecture to both improve the agents' performance and enable fine-tuning them on mismatched test scenarios with higher numbers of agents and/or actions.