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Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) has recently emerged as a popular framework for cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), where agents can use additional global state information to guide training in a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Yihe Zhou , Shunyu Liu , Yunpeng Qing , Kaixuan Chen , Tongya Zheng , Jie Song , Mingli Song

Recent work has explored optimizing LLM collaboration through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). However, most MARL fine-tuning approaches rely on predefined execution protocols, which often require centralized execution.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Shuo Liu , Tianle Chen , Ryan Amiri , Christopher Amato

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), combining value decomposition with actor-critic enables agents to learn stochastic policies, which are more suitable for the partially observable environment. Given the goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Jiangxing Wang , Deheng Ye , Zongqing Lu

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has exploded in popularity in recent years. Many approaches have been developed but they can be divided into three main types: centralized training and execution (CTE), centralized training for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-22 Christopher Amato

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) commonly adopts centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE), where centralized critics leverage global information to guide decentralized actors. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Yan Wang , Ke Deng , Yongli Ren

Recent developments in deep reinforcement learning are concerned with creating decision-making agents which can perform well in various complex domains. A particular approach which has received increasing attention is multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Georgios Papoudakis , Filippos Christianos , Arrasy Rahman , Stefano V. Albrecht

In many real-world multi-agent cooperative tasks, due to high cost and risk, agents cannot continuously interact with the environment and collect experiences during learning, but have to learn from offline datasets. However, the transition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Jiechuan Jiang , Zongqing Lu

We present a multi-agent actor-critic method that aims to implicitly address the credit assignment problem under fully cooperative settings. Our key motivation is that credit assignment among agents may not require an explicit formulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Meng Zhou , Ziyu Liu , Pengwei Sui , Yixuan Li , Yuk Ying Chung

One of the challenges for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is designing efficient learning algorithms for a large system in which each agent has only limited or partial information of the entire system. While exciting progress has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Haotian Gu , Xin Guo , Xiaoli Wei , Renyuan Xu

We consider the problem of \emph{fully decentralized} multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where the agents are located at the nodes of a time-varying communication network. Specifically, we assume that the reward functions of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-28 Kaiqing Zhang , Zhuoran Yang , Han Liu , Tong Zhang , Tamer Başar

In real-world environments, autonomous agents rely on their egocentric observations. They must learn adaptive strategies to interact with others who possess mixed motivations, discernible only through visible cues. Several Multi-Agent…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Violet Xiang , Logan Cross , Jan-Philipp Fränken , Nick Haber

Many real-world tasks involve multiple agents with partial observability and limited communication. Learning is challenging in these settings due to local viewpoints of agents, which perceive the world as non-stationary due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-23 Shayegan Omidshafiei , Jason Pazis , Christopher Amato , Jonathan P. How , John Vian

In this paper, we study the problem of reinforcement learning in multi-agent systems where communication among agents is limited. We develop a decentralized actor-critic learning framework in which each agent performs several local updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Xiaoxing Ren , Nicola Bastianello , Thomas Parisini , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has gained significant interest in recent years, enabling sequential decision-making across multiple agents in various domains. However, most existing explanation methods focus on centralized MARL,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Kayla Boggess , Sarit Kraus , Lu Feng

In decentralized cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, agents can aggregate information from one another to learn policies that maximize a team-average objective function. Despite the willingness to cooperate with others, the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-27 Martin Figura , Yixuan Lin , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta

Multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms have not been widely adopted in large scale environments with many agents as they often scale poorly with the number of agents. Using mean field theory to aggregate agents has been proposed as a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian , Matthew E. Taylor , Mark Crowley , Pascal Poupart

This paper introduces Team-Attention-Actor-Critic (TAAC), a reinforcement learning algorithm designed to enhance multi-agent collaboration in cooperative environments. TAAC employs a Centralized Training/Centralized Execution scheme…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Hugo Garrido-Lestache Belinchon , Jeremy Kedziora

We show that offline actor-critic reinforcement learning can scale to large models - such as transformers - and follows similar scaling laws as supervised learning. We find that offline actor-critic algorithms can outperform strong,…

Traditional centralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms are sometimes unpractical in complicated applications, due to non-interactivity between agents, curse of dimensionality and computation complexity. Hence, several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Wenhao Li , Bo Jin , Xiangfeng Wang , Junchi Yan , Hongyuan Zha

Recent success in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) relies on centralized training and policy sharing. Centralized training eliminates the issue of non-stationarity MARL yet induces large communication costs, and policy…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-04-04 Dingyang Chen , Yile Li , Qi Zhang