Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many recent works in the field of multi-agent reinforcement learning via communication focus on learning what messages to send, when to send, and whom to address such messages. Those works indicate that communication is useful for higher cumulative reward or task success. However, one important limitation is that most of them ignore the importance of enforcing agents' ability to understand the received information. In this paper, we notice that observation and communication signals are from separate information sources. Thus, we enhance the communicating agents with the capability to integrate crucial information from different sources. Specifically, we propose a multi-modal communication method, which modulates agents' observation and communication signals as different modalities and performs multi-modal fusion to allow knowledge to transfer across different modalities. We evaluate the proposed method on a diverse set of cooperative multi-agent tasks with several state-of-the-art algorithms. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in incorporating knowledge and gaining a deeper understanding from various information sources.