Exploring Task-oriented Communication in Multi-agent System: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

The multi-agent system (MAS) enables the sharing of capabilities among agents, such that collaborative tasks can be accomplished with high scalability and efficiency. MAS is increasingly widely applied in various fields. Meanwhile, the large-scale and time-sensitive data transmission between agents brings challenges to the communication system. The traditional wireless communication ignores the content of the data and its impact on the task execution at the receiver, which makes it difficult to guarantee the timeliness and relevance of the information. This limitation leads to that traditional wireless communication struggles to effectively support emerging multi-agent collaborative applications. Faced with this dilemma, task-oriented communication is a potential solution, which aims to transmit task-relevant information to improve task execution performance. However, multi-agent collaboration itself is a complex class of sequential decision problems. It is challenging to explore efficient information flow in this context. In this article, we use deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to explore task-oriented communication in MAS. We begin with a discussion on the application of DRL to task-oriented communication. We then envision a task-oriented communication architecture for MAS, and discuss the designs based on DRL. Finally, we discuss open problems for future research and conclude this article.