{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Improving Multi-agent Coordination by Learning to Estimate Contention","authors":[{"name":"Panayiotis Danassis","slug":"panayiotis-danassis","given":"Panayiotis","family":"Danassis","affiliation":""},{"name":"Florian Wiedemair","slug":"florian-wiedemair","given":"Florian","family":"Wiedemair","affiliation":""},{"name":"Boi Faltings","slug":"boi-faltings","given":"Boi","family":"Faltings","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"We present a multi-agent learning algorithm, ALMA-Learning, for efficient and fair allocations in large-scale systems. We circumvent the traditional pitfalls of multi-agent learning (e.g., the moving target problem, the curse of dimensionality, or the need for mutually consistent actions) by relying on the ALMA heuristic as a coordination mechanism for each stage game. ALMA-Learning is decentralized, observes only own action/reward pairs, requires no inter-agent communication, and achieves near-optimal (<5% loss) and fair coordination in a variety of synthetic scenarios and a real-world meeting scheduling problem. The lightweight nature and fast learning constitute ALMA-Learning ideal for on-device deployment.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2021/18","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/18","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/0018.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/18.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/bibtex/18","volume":{"slug":"2021","title":"Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2021","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/","year":2021,"location":"Montreal","dates":"19-27 August 2021","editors":"Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou","isbn":"978-0-9992411-9-6","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2021"},"section":"Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems","track":"Main Track","number":18,"pages":{"first":125,"last":131},"keywords":["Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Resource Allocation","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Coordination and Cooperation","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Multi-agent Learning"],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}