On Learning Intrinsic Rewards for Faster Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning based MAC Protocol Design in 6G Wireless Networks

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel framework for designing a fast convergent multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based medium access control (MAC) protocol operating in a single cell scenario. The user equipments (UEs) are cast as learning agents that need to learn a proper signaling policy to coordinate the transmission of protocol data units (PDUs) to the base station (BS) over shared radio resources. In many MARL tasks, the conventional centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) is adopted, where each agent receives the same global extrinsic reward from the environment. However, this approach involves a long training time. To overcome this drawback, we adopt the concept of learning a per-agent intrinsic reward, in which each agent learns a different intrinsic reward signal based solely on its individual behavior. Moreover, in order to provide an intrinsic reward function that takes into account the long-term training history, we represent it as a long shortterm memory (LSTM) network. As a result, each agent updates its policy network considering both the extrinsic reward, which characterizes the cooperative task, and the intrinsic reward that reflects local dynamics. The proposed learning framework yields a faster convergence and higher transmission performance compared to the baselines. Simulation results show that the proposed learning solution yields 75% improvement in convergence speed compared to the most performing baseline.