Toward Collaborative Reinforcement Learning Agents that Communicate Through Text-Based Natural Language

Communication between agents in collaborative multi-agent settings is in general implicit or a direct data stream. This paper considers text-based natural language as a novel form of communication between multiple agents trained with reinforcement learning. This could be considered first steps toward a truly autonomous communication without the need to define a limited set of instructions, and natural collaboration between humans and robots. Inspired by the game of Blind Leads, we propose an environment where one agent uses natural language instructions to guide another through a maze. We test the ability of reinforcement learning agents to effectively communicate through discrete word-level symbols and show that the agents are able to sufficiently communicate through natural language with a limited vocabulary. Although the communication is not always perfect English, the agents are still able to navigate the maze. We achieve a BLEU score of 0.85, which is an improvement of 0.61 over randomly generated sequences while maintaining a 100% maze completion rate. This is a 3.5 times the performance of the random baseline using our reference set. 5 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables; published in 2021 Southern African Universities Power Engineering Conference/Robotics and Mechatronics/Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (SAUPEC/RobMech/PRASA), 2021, pp. 1-6, (c) 2021 IEEE