Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks for Learning Diverse Communication

Multi-agent teaming achieves better performance when there is communication among participating agents allowing them to coordinate their actions for maximizing shared utility. However, when collaborating a team of agents with different action and observation spaces, information sharing is not straightforward and requires customized communication protocols, depending on sender and receiver types. Without properly modeling such heterogeneity in agents, communication becomes less helpful and could even deteriorate the multi-agent cooperation performance. We propose heterogeneous graph attention networks, called HetNet, to learn efficient and diverse communication models for coordinating heterogeneous agents towards accomplishing tasks that are of collaborative nature. We propose a Multi-Agent Heterogeneous Actor-Critic (MAHAC) learning paradigm to obtain collaborative per-class policies and effective communication protocols for composite robot teams. Our proposed framework is evaluated against multiple baselines in a complex environment in which agents of different types must communicate and cooperate to satisfy the objectives. Experimental results show that HetNet outperforms the baselines in learning sophisticated multi-agent communication protocols by achieving ~10% improvements in performance metrics.