Solving the Diffusion of Responsibility Problem in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning with a Policy Resonance Approach

SOTA multiagent reinforcement algorithms distinguish themselves in many ways from their single-agent equivalences, except that they still totally inherit the single-agent exploration-exploitation strategy. We report that naively inheriting this strategy from single-agent algorithms causes potential collaboration failures, in which the agents blindly follow mainstream behaviors and reject taking minority responsibility. We named this problem the diffusion of responsibility (DR) as it shares similarities with a same-name social psychology effect. In this work, we start by theoretically analyzing the cause of the DR problem, emphasizing it is not relevant to the reward crafting or the credit assignment problems. We propose a Policy Resonance approach to address the DR problem by modifying the multiagent exploration-exploitation strategy. Next, we show that most SOTA algorithms can equip this approach to promote collaborative agent performance in complex cooperative tasks. Experiments are performed in multiple test benchmark tasks to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach.