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In this paper, we propose a distributed zeroth-order policy optimization method for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Existing MARL algorithms often assume that every agent can observe the states and actions of all the other agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

Game-theoretic resource allocation on graphs (GRAG) involves two players competing over multiple steps to control nodes of interest on a graph, a problem modeled as a multi-step Colonel Blotto Game (MCBG). Finding optimal strategies is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Zijian An , Lifeng Zhou

Trust region methods rigorously enabled reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn monotonically improving policies, leading to superior performance on a variety of tasks. Unfortunately, when it comes to multi-agent reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-05 Jakub Grudzien Kuba , Ruiqing Chen , Muning Wen , Ying Wen , Fanglei Sun , Jun Wang , Yaodong Yang

Action-dependent individual policies, which incorporate both environmental states and the actions of other agents in decision-making, have emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving global optimality in multi-agent reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jianglin Ding , Jingcheng Tang , Gangshan Jing

Many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are impractical for training in operational systems or computationally expensive high-fidelity simulations, as they require large amounts of data. Meanwhile, low-fidelity simulators, e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Xinjie Liu , Cyrus Neary , Kushagra Gupta , Wesley A. Suttle , Christian Ellis , Ufuk Topcu , David Fridovich-Keil

Policy gradient methods are an attractive approach to multi-agent reinforcement learning problems due to their convergence properties and robustness in partially observable scenarios. However, there is a significant performance gap between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Bozhidar Vasilev , Tarun Gupta , Bei Peng , Shimon Whiteson

Cooperative MARL often assumes frequent access to global information in a data buffer, such as team rewards or other agents' actions, which is typically unrealistic in decentralized MARL systems due to high communication costs. When…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Nuoya Xiong , Aarti Singh

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous action spaces is often approached by directly training parametric policies along the direction of estimated policy gradients (PGs). Previous research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Gang Chen

Large language models (LLMs) are versatile, yet their deployment in complex real-world settings is limited by static knowledge cutoffs and the difficulty of producing controllable behavior within a single inference. Multi-agent search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Guanzhong Chen , Shaoxiong Yang , Chao Li , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Zenglin Xu

We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Pan Xu , Felicia Gao , Quanquan Gu

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) provides a framework for problems involving multiple interacting agents. Despite apparent similarity to the single-agent case, multi-agent problems are often harder to train and analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Michał Zawalski , Błażej Osiński , Henryk Michalewski , Piotr Miłoś

Diversity plays a crucial role in improving the performance of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Currently, many diversity-based methods have been developed to overcome the drawbacks of excessive parameter sharing in traditional…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Tianyi Hu , Zhiqiang Pu , Xiaolin Ai , Tenghai Qiu , Jianqiang Yi

Hybrid RL is the setting where an RL agent has access to both offline data and online data by interacting with the real-world environment. In this work, we propose a new hybrid RL algorithm that combines an on-policy actor-critic method…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Yifei Zhou , Ayush Sekhari , Yuda Song , Wen Sun

Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Matteo Papini , Giorgio Manganini , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in multi-agent settings. However, the success of adversarial optimization has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Niklas Lauffer , Ameesh Shah , Micah Carroll , Sanjit A. Seshia , Stuart Russell , Michael Dennis

We discuss the problem of decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in this work. In our setting, the global state, action, and reward are assumed to be fully observable, while the local policy is protected as privacy by each…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Kuo Li , Qing-Shan Jia

Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Debabrota Basu , Udvas Das , Brahim Driss , Uddalak Mukherjee

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a promising area of research that can model and control multiple, autonomous decision-making agents. During online training, MARL algorithms involve performance-intensive computations such as…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Kailash Gogineni , Peng Wei , Tian Lan , Guru Venkataramani

Role-playing agents (RPAs) require balancing multiple objectives, such as instruction following, persona consistency, and stylistic fidelity, which are not always perfectly aligned across different dimensions. While prior work has primarily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Chonghua Liao , Ke Wang , Yuchuan Wu , Ruoran Li , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini