Networked Communication for Decentralised Cooperative Agents in Mean-Field Control

Abstract: We introduce networked communication to mean-field control (MFC) - the cooperative counterpart to mean-field games (MFGs) - and in particular to the setting where decentralised agents learn online from a single, non-episodic run of the empirical system. We adapt recent algorithms for MFGs to this new setting, as well as contributing a novel sub-routine allowing networked agents to estimate the global average reward from their local neighbourhood. We show that the networked communication scheme allows agents to increase social welfare faster than under both the centralised and independent architectures, by computing a population of potential updates in parallel and then propagating the highest-performing ones through the population, via a method that can also be seen as tackling the credit-assignment problem. We prove this new result theoretically and provide experiments that support it across numerous games, as well as exploring the empirical finding that smaller communication radii can benefit convergence in a specific class of game while still outperforming agents learning entirely independently. We provide numerous ablation studies and additional experiments on numbers of communication round and robustness to communication failures.