Collaboration Promotes Group Resilience in Multi-Agent AI

Abstract: AI agents need to be robust to unexpected changes in their environment in order to safely operate in real-world scenarios. While some work has been done on this type of robustness in the single-agent case, in this work we introduce the idea that collaboration with other agents can help agents adapt to environment perturbations in multi-agent reinforcement learning settings. We first formalize this notion of resilience of a group of agents. We then empirically evaluate different collaboration protocols and examine their effect on resilience. We see that all of the collaboration approaches considered lead to greater resilience compared to baseline, in line with our hypothesis. We discuss future direction and the general relevance of the concept of resilience introduced in this work.