HAVEN: Hierarchical Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Dual Coordination Mechanism

Multi-agent reinforcement learning often suffers from the exponentially larger action space caused by a large number of agents. In this paper, we propose a novel value decomposition framework HAVEN based on hierarchical reinforcement learning for the fully cooperative multi-agent problems. In order to address instabilities that arise from the concurrent optimization of high-level and low-level policies and another concurrent optimization of agents, we introduce the dual coordination mechanism of inter-layer strategies and inter-agent strategies. HAVEN does not require domain knowledge and pretraining at all, and can be applied to any value decomposition variants. Our method is demonstrated to achieve superior results to many baselines on StarCraft II micromanagement tasks and offers an efficient solution to multi-agent hierarchical reinforcement learning in fully cooperative scenarios.