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Discovering successful coordinated behaviors is a central challenge in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) since it requires exploring a joint action space that grows exponentially with the number of agents. In this paper, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Ammar Fayad , Majd Ibrahim

The primary focus of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been to study interactions among a fixed number of agents embedded in an environment. However, in the real world, the number of agents is neither fixed nor known a priori.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Shishir Sharma , Doina Precup , Theodore J. Perkins

Groups of humans are often able to find ways to cooperate with one another in complex, temporally extended social dilemmas. Models based on behavioral economics are only able to explain this phenomenon for unrealistic stateless matrix…

Social dilemmas are situations where individuals face a temptation to increase their payoffs at a cost to total welfare. Building artificially intelligent agents that achieve good outcomes in these situations is important because many real…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-05 Adam Lerer , Alexander Peysakhovich

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) comprises an area of growing interest in the field of machine learning. Despite notable advances, there are still problems that require investigation. The lazy agent pathology is a famous problem in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Rafael Pina , Varuna De Silva , Corentin Artaud

In tabular multi-agent reinforcement learning with average-cost criterion, a team of agents sequentially interacts with the environment and observes local incentives. We focus on the case that the global reward is a sum of local rewards,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-26 Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Bhargav Ganguly , Vaneet Aggarwal

Modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are able to outperform humans in a wide variety of tasks. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) settings present additional challenges, and successful cooperation in mixed-motive groups of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Ram Rachum , Yonatan Nakar , Bill Tomlinson , Nitay Alon , Reuth Mirsky

Cooperation is fundamental in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), often requiring agents to balance individual gains with collective rewards. In this regard, this paper aims to investigate strategies to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Vaigarai Sathi , Sabahat Shaik , Jaswanth Nidamanuri

Standard multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms are vulnerable to sim-to-real gaps. To address this, distributionally robust Markov games (RMGs) have been proposed to enhance robustness in MARL by optimizing the worst-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Laixi Shi , Jingchu Gai , Eric Mazumdar , Yuejie Chi , Adam Wierman

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has become effective in tackling discrete cooperative game scenarios. However, MARL has yet to penetrate settings beyond those modelled by team and zero-sum games, confining it to a small subset of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-06-16 David Mguni , Yutong Wu , Yali Du , Yaodong Yang , Ziyi Wang , Minne Li , Ying Wen , Joel Jennings , Jun Wang

Social dilemmas have been widely studied to explain how humans are able to cooperate in society. Considerable effort has been invested in designing artificial agents for social dilemmas that incorporate explicit agent motivations that are…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-08-30 Nicolas Anastassacos , Stephen Hailes , Mirco Musolesi

In this work, we integrate `social' interactions into the MARL setup through a user-defined relational network and examine the effects of agent-agent relations on the rise of emergent behaviors. Leveraging insights from sociology and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Hossein Haeri , Reza Ahmadzadeh , Kshitij Jerath

The cooperation mechanism of indirect reciprocity has been studied by making multiple variations of its parts. This research proposes a new variant of Nowak and Sigmund model, focused on agents' attitude; it is called Individualistic…

Team formation and the dynamics of team-based learning have drawn significant interest in the context of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). However, existing studies primarily focus on unilateral groupings, predefined teams, or…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Koorosh Moslemi , Chi-Guhn Lee

We present a reinforcement learning strategy for use in multi-agent foraging systems in which the learning is centralised to a single agent and its model is periodically disseminated among the population of non-learning agents. In a domain…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Ian O'Flynn , Harun Šiljak

We propose a unified mechanism for achieving coordination and communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), through rewarding agents for having causal influence over other agents' actions. Causal influence is assessed using…

Sparse rewards are a major bottleneck in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where simultaneous learning induces non-stationarity and makes reward design especially delicate. Reward shaping can accelerate learning, but in the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Elie Abboud , Oren Gal

The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter Sunehag , Edward Hughes , Hongyuan Zha

Many cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning environments provide agents with a sparse team-based reward, as well as a dense agent-specific reward that incentivizes learning basic skills. Training policies solely on the team-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Shauharda Khadka , Somdeb Majumdar , Santiago Miret , Stephen McAleer , Kagan Tumer

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods, while effective in zero-sum or positive-sum games, often yield suboptimal outcomes in general-sum games where cooperation is essential for achieving globally optimal outcomes. Matrix game…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Mustafa Yasir , Andrew Howes , Vasilios Mavroudis , Chris Hicks