SUPER - Shared Multi-Agent Prioritized Experience Relay

Matthias Gerstgrasser, Tom Danino, Sarah Keren, NeurIPS 2023

SUPER is a multi-agent DQN algorithm, sharing high td-error experiences among agents similarly to how experiences are sampled from the replay buffer in (single-agent) DQN with PER.

Update: We are in the process of contributing SUPER back into mainline RLLib: ray-project/ray#41079

Installation

To install, run:

pip install -e .

Usage

SUPER is built as a modified RLlib DQN algorithm. In order to use SUPER in your project, simply replace the DQN algorithm in your code with suPERDQN from our package. You can modify suPER settings using the suPERDQNConfig.train() method. For example:

from suPER.core.trainers import suPERDQN, suPERDQNConfig

config = suPERDQNConfig().train(suPER_bandwidth=0.2).environment(...)
trainer = suPERDQN(config=config)

Citation

@article{gerstgrasser2024selectively,
  title={Selectively Sharing Experiences Improves Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning},
  author={Gerstgrasser, Matthias and Danino, Tom and Keren, Sarah},
  journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume={36},
  year={2024}
}

Reproducing Paper Experiments

We also provide implementations of all the experiments in the paper. To reproduce the experiments, follow these instructions:

Installing Preqrequisites for Experiments

We recommend setting up a virtual Python environment using pyenv-virtualenv, Anaconda or similar, using Python version 3.8 or higher. Installing the suPER package will install all dependencies, but due to a conflict between ray and PettingZoo, it is currently necessary to install gym version 0.22 manually afterwards. The following should work. On Linux, you may have to sudo apt install swig -y first.

pip install -U tensorflow==2.10.0 tensorflow-probability==0.17.0 torch==1.12.1 wandb 'pettingzoo[magent,sisl]==1.20.1' supersuit==3.5.0
pip install -U gym==0.22.0

Running SUPER Experiments

To run experiments, run suPER/experiments/main.py with the appropriate arguments. Set the environment to one of pursuit, battle, or adversarial_pursuit. You can set --seed and --num_seeds to run one or more specific seeds.

main.py [--suPER SUPER] [--suPER_mode SUPER_MODE] [--suPER_bandwidth SUPER_BANDWIDTH] [--env ENV] 

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --suPER SUPER         Set to 'True' to Enable the suPER mechanism
  --suPER_mode SUPER_MODE
                        Use quantile, gaussian or stochastic mode
  --suPER_bandwidth SUPER_BANDWIDTH
                        Bandwidth for suPER as steps/step
  --suPER_window SUPER_WINDOW
                        Window size for calculating mean/var/quantile in suPER
  --team_sharing TEAM_SHARING
                        if team_sharing not empty, only agent whose policy id contains the string can share
  --env ENV             Determines the training environment
  --ray_local_mode      If enabled, init ray in local mode.
  --use_gpu USE_GPU     How many GPUs to use, if any

Running SEAC Experiments

We provide a local copy of the SEAC code modified to work with the PettingZoo environments we use in the paper. This is under seac/. Run python train.py with env=pursuit and similar for battle, adversarial_pursuit.

Ray Cluster

If you would like to run a large number of experiments, we provide a Ray cluster configuration for AWS, in ray_runtime.yaml. Follow the Ray setup instructions. Running run_all.sh will submit most experiments (except MADDPG and SEAC) to the Ray cluster.