ACM: Learning Dynamic Multi-agent Cooperation via Attentional Communication Model

The collaboration of multiple agents is required in many real world applications, and yet it is a challenging task due to partial observability. Communication is a common scheme to resolve this problem. However, most of the communication protocols are manually specified and can not capture the dynamic interactions among agents. To address this problem, this paper presents a novel Attentional Communication Model (ACM) to achieve dynamic multi-agent cooperation. Firstly, we propose a new Cooperation-aware Network (CAN) to capture the dynamic interactions including both the dynamic routing and messaging among agents. Secondly, the CAN is integrated into Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework to learn the policy of multi-agent cooperation. The approach is evaluated in both discrete and continuous environments, and outperforms competing methods promisingly.