English

Benchmarking Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms in Cooperative Tasks

Machine Learning 2021-11-10 v4 Artificial Intelligence Multiagent Systems Machine Learning

Abstract

Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL) suffers from a lack of commonly-used evaluation tasks and criteria, making comparisons between approaches difficult. In this work, we provide a systematic evaluation and comparison of three different classes of MARL algorithms (independent learning, centralised multi-agent policy gradient, value decomposition) in a diverse range of cooperative multi-agent learning tasks. Our experiments serve as a reference for the expected performance of algorithms across different learning tasks, and we provide insights regarding the effectiveness of different learning approaches. We open-source EPyMARL, which extends the PyMARL codebase to include additional algorithms and allow for flexible configuration of algorithm implementation details such as parameter sharing. Finally, we open-source two environments for multi-agent research which focus on coordination under sparse rewards.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.07869,
  title  = {Benchmarking Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms in Cooperative Tasks},
  author = {Georgios Papoudakis and Filippos Christianos and Lukas Schäfer and Stefano V. Albrecht},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.07869},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Published in 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021) Track on Datasets and Benchmarks

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:18:38.001Z