Differentially Private Malicious Agent Avoidance in Multiagent Advising Learning

Agent advising is one of the key approaches to improve agent learning performance by enabling agents to ask for advice between each other. Existing agent advising approaches have two limitations. The first limitation is that all the agents in a system are assumed to be friendly and cooperative. However, in the real world, malicious agents may exist and provide false advice to hinder the learning performance of other agents. The second limitation is that the analysis of communication overhead in these approaches is either overlooked or simplified. However, in communication-constrained environments, communication overhead has to be carefully considered. To overcome the two limitations, this paper proposes a novel differentially private agent advising approach. Our approach employs the Laplace mechanism to add noise on the rewards used by student agents to select teacher agents. By using the differential privacy technique, the proposed approach can reduce the impact of malicious agents without identifying them. Also, by adopting the privacy budget concept, the proposed approach can naturally control communication overhead. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.