English

Decoupled Delay Compensation: Enhancing Pre-trained MARL Policies via Learned Dynamics Filtering

Multiagent Systems 2026-05-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence Robotics

Abstract

Real-world multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems must often operate under stale observations, stochastic communication delays, and intermittent packet loss. Policies trained under idealized synchronous conditions frequently exhibit significant performance degradation in these regimes because they act on outdated feedback. We propose a modular execution-stage state-estimation layer that replaces delayed communicated observations with current belief-state estimates. The framework integrates a learned Gated transition model with a recursive Kalman filtering layer to estimate instantaneous states from asynchronous measurements. A primary advantage of this approach is its modularity, The estimator serves as a plug-in for pre-trained policies, requiring no modifications to the original MARL training algorithm, architecture, or reward structure. Evaluation across diverse multi-agent and continuous-control benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed layer consistently enhances robustness to communication latency and message loss. The most significant performance gains are observed in coordination-intensive and dynamically unstable tasks where temporal consistency is critical for control.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.26286,
  title  = {Decoupled Delay Compensation: Enhancing Pre-trained MARL Policies via Learned Dynamics Filtering},
  author = {Maxim Mednikov and Oren Gal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26286},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:33:18.939Z