Regret-Minimization Algorithms for Multi-Agent Cooperative Learning Systems

Abstract

A Multi-Agent Cooperative Learning (MACL) system is an artificial intelligence (AI) system where multiple learning agents work together to complete a common task. Recent empirical success of MACL systems in various domains (e.g. traffic control, cloud computing, robotics) has sparked active research into the design and analysis of MACL systems for sequential decision making problems. One important metric of the learning algorithm for decision making problems is its regret, i.e. the difference between the highest achievable reward and the actual reward that the algorithm gains. The design and development of a MACL system with low-regret learning algorithms can create huge economic values. In this thesis, I analyze MACL systems for different sequential decision making problems. Concretely, the Chapter 3 and 4 investigate the cooperative multi-agent multi-armed bandit problems, with full-information or bandit feedback, in which multiple learning agents can exchange their information through a communication network and the agents can only observe the rewards of the actions they choose. Chapter 5 considers the communication-regret trade-off for online convex optimization in the distributed setting. Chapter 6 discusses how to form high-productive teams for agents based on their unknown but fixed types using adaptive incremental matchings. For the above problems, I present the regret lower bounds for feasible learning algorithms and provide the efficient algorithms to achieve this bound. The regret bounds I present in Chapter 3, 4 and 5 quantify how the regret depends on the connectivity of the communication network and the communication delay, thus giving useful guidance on design of the communication protocol in MACL systems