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<article-title>Commitment-Driven Distributed Joint Policy Search</article-title></title-group>

<author><a href="mailto:witwicki@umich.edu"><name>Stefan Witwicki</name></a></author>
<aff>Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science <br/>University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:durfee@umich.edu"><name>Edmund Durfee</name></a></author>
<aff>Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science <br/>University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109</aff>
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<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>Decentralized MDPs provide powerful models of interactions
in multi-agent environments, but are often very difficult or
even computationally infeasible to solve optimally. Here we
develop a hierarchical approach to solving a restricted set of
decentralized MDPs. By forming commitments with other
agents and modeling these concisely in their local MDPs,
agents effectively, efficiently, and distributively formulate coordinated
local policies. We introduce a novel construction
that captures commitments as constraints on local policies
and show how Linear Programming can be used to achieve
local optimality subject to these constraints. In contrast to
other commitment enforcement approaches, we show ours
to be more robust in capturing the intended commitment
semantics while maximizing local utility. We also describe
a commitment-space heuristic search algorithm that can be
used to approximate optimal joint policies. A preliminary
empirical evaluation suggests that our approach yields faster
approximate solutions than the conventional encoding of
the problem as a multiagent MDP would allow and, when
wrapped in an exhaustive commitment-space search, will
find the optimal global solution.</p>
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