Abstract: Whether it is in sorting defects from grain in an agricultural setting, ore from tailings in a mine, or letters in a postal system, the sorting of bulk material has long been a crucial aspect of human industry.  Today, in the face of dwindling natural resource deposits and accelerating climate change, a particularly important [...]

Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning presents unique hurdles such as the non-stationary problem beyond single-agent reinforcement learning that makes learning effective decentralized cooperative policies using an agent's local state extremely challenging. Effective communication to share information and coordinate is vital for agents to work together and solve cooperative tasks, as the ubiquitous evidence of communication in [...]