Handling realistic noise in multi-agent systems with self-supervised learning and curiosity

Most reinforcement learning benchmarks – especially in multi-agent tasks – do not go beyond observations with simple noise; nonetheless, real scenarios induce more elaborate vision pipeline failures: false sightings, misclassifications or occlusion. In this work, we propose a lightweight, 2D environment for robot soccer and autonomous driving that can emulate the above discrepancies. Besides establishing a benchmark for accessible multiagent reinforcement learning research, our work addresses the challenges the simulator imposes. For handling realistic noise, we use self-supervised learning to enhance scene reconstruction and extend curiosity-driven learning to model longer horizons. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance, compared against actor-critic methods, ICM, and PPO.