Multi-agent reinforcement learning with bidding for automatic segmentation of action sequences

We present an approach for developing multi-agent reinforcement learning systems that are made up of a coalition of modular agents. We focus on learning to segment action sequences to create modular structures in reinforcement learning, through adding an additional bidding process that is based on reinforcements received during task execution. The approach segments sequences and distributes them among agents to facilitate the learning of the overall task. Notably, our approach does not rely on a priori knowledge or a priori structures. Initial experiments demonstrated the basic promise of the approach. This work shows how bidding and reinforcement learning can be usefully combined, thus pointing to a new and promising approach