Meta-Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Fast Adaptation of Interactive Policies with Applications to Autonomous Driving

Abstract

This paper develops a meta-multi-agent reinforcement learning (meta-MARL) framework to enable fast adaptation of interactive policies in a multi-agent system (MAS). Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) enables agents to rapidly adapt to new tasks/environments using a bi-level optimization mechanism. However, existing meta-RL generally focuses on single-agent systems. Extending these frameworks and algorithms to multi-agent systems poses additional challenges, as tasks are characterized by not only the environment but also agents'strategic interactions. To address these challenges, we model multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems as Markov games (MGs) and develop a meta-MARL framework for rapid interactive policy adaptation across a distribution of MGs. A new concept, called meta-NE, is defined to describe the desired solution concept in a meta-MARL problem. Sufficient conditions for the equivalence between a meta-NE and a stationary point of the gradient-play-based meta-MARL algorithm are established. Our evaluation on autonomous-driving tasks demonstrates that the proposed meta-MARL method achieves faster adaptation than pretrained MARL baselines, validating the effectiveness of our framework.