Mixture of personality improved spiking actor network for efficient multi-agent cooperation

• Published in: Frontiers in neuroscience Vol. 17; p. 1219405
• Main Authors: Li, Xiyun, Ni, Ziyi, Ruan, Jingqing, Meng, Linghui, Shi, Jing, Zhang, Tielin, Xu, Bo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 06.07.2023
• Subjects: multi-agent cooperation; multi-agent reinforcement learning; Neuroscience; personality theory; spiking actor networks; theory of mind; multi-agent reinforcement learning; theory of mind; spiking actor networks; personality theory; multi-agent cooperation
• ISSN: 1662-453X; 1662-4548; 1662-453X
• DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1219405

Adaptive multi-agent cooperation with especially unseen partners is becoming more challenging in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) research, whereby conventional deep-learning-based algorithms suffer from the poor new-player-generalization problem, possibly caused by not considering theory-of-mind theory (ToM). Inspired by the ToM personality in cognitive psychology, where a human can easily resolve this problem by predicting others' intuitive personality first before complex actions, we propose a biologically-plausible algorithm named the mixture of personality (MoP) improved spiking actor network (SAN). The MoP module contains a determinantal point process to simulate the formation and integration of different personality types, and the SAN module contains spiking neurons for efficient reinforcement learning. The experimental results on the benchmark cooperative overcooked task showed that the proposed MoP-SAN algorithm could achieve higher performance for the paradigms with (learning) and without (generalization) unseen partners. Furthermore, ablation experiments highlighted the contribution of MoP in SAN learning, and some visualization analysis explained why the proposed algorithm is superior to some counterpart deep actor networks.