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Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Thomas Spooner , Nelson Vadori , Sumitra Ganesh

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (CMARL) has shown to be promising for many real-world applications. Previous works mainly focus on improving coordination ability via solving MARL-specific challenges (e.g., non-stationarity,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Lei Yuan , Zi-Qian Zhang , Ke Xue , Hao Yin , Feng Chen , Cong Guan , Li-He Li , Chao Qian , Yang Yu

Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) have achieved super-human performance in games like Quake 3 and Dota 2. Unfortunately, these techniques require orders-of-magnitude more training rounds than humans and don't…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Tianjun Zhang , Huazhe Xu , Xiaolong Wang , Yi Wu , Kurt Keutzer , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Yuandong Tian

We extend trust region policy optimization (TRPO) to multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. We show that the policy update of TRPO can be transformed into a distributed consensus optimization problem for multi-agent cases. By…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Hepeng Li , Haibo He

Group-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved remarkable success in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) and have been rapidly extended to agentic tasks. However, their credit assignment relies heavily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Xin Cheng , Shuo He , Lang Feng , HaiYang Xu , Ming Yan , Lei Feng , Bo An

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) optimizes strategic interactions in non-cooperative dynamic games, where agents have misaligned objectives. However, data-driven methods such as multi-agent policy gradients (MA-PG) often suffer…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-13 Jingqi Li , Gechen Qu , Jason J. Choi , Somayeh Sojoudi , Claire Tomlin

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools via multi-agent systems offers a promising new paradigm for decomposing and solving complex problems. However, training these systems remains notoriously difficult due to the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yanming Li , Xuelin Zhang , WenJie Lu , Ziye Tang , Maodong Wu , Haotian Luo , Tongtong Wu , Zijie Peng , Hongze Mi , Yibo Feng , Naiqiang Tan , Chao Huang , Hong Chen , Li Shen

Credit assignmen, disentangling each agent's contribution to a shared reward, is a critical challenge in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). To be effective, credit assignment methods must preserve the environment's…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Aditya Kapoor , Kale-ab Tessera , Mayank Baranwal , Harshad Khadilkar , Jan Peters , Stefano Albrecht , Mingfei Sun

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning is a decentralized paradigm in sequential decision making where agents distributed over a network iteratively collaborate with neighbors to maximize global (network-wide) notions of rewards.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Carlo Alfano , Patrick Rebeschini

Multi-agent navigation in dynamic environments is of great industrial value when deploying a large scale fleet of robot to real-world applications. This paper proposes a decentralized partially observable multi-agent path planning with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-08-03 Zuxin Liu , Baiming Chen , Hongyi Zhou , Guru Koushik , Martial Hebert , Ding Zhao

Multi-agent interactions are increasingly important in the context of reinforcement learning, and the theoretical foundations of policy gradient methods have attracted surging research interest. We investigate the global convergence of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-21 Sarath Pattathil , Kaiqing Zhang , Asuman Ozdaglar

[Zhang, ICML 2018] provided the first decentralized actor-critic algorithm for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) that offers convergence guarantees. In that work, policies are stochastic and are defined on finite action spaces. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Antoine Grosnit , Desmond Cai , Laura Wynter

We consider a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem where each agent seeks to maximize a shared reward while interacting with other agents, and they may or may not be able to communicate. Typically the agents do not have access to…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Alex Tong Lin , Mark J. Debord , Katia Estabridis , Gary Hewer , Guido Montufar , Stanley Osher

Extending transfer learning to cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently received much attention. In contrast to the single-agent setting, the coordination indispensable in cooperative MARL constrains each agent's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Tianze Zhou , Fubiao Zhang , Kun Shao , Kai Li , Wenhan Huang , Jun Luo , Weixun Wang , Yaodong Yang , Hangyu Mao , Bin Wang , Dong Li , Wulong Liu , Jianye Hao

This work studies non-cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) where multiple agents interact in the same environment and whose goal is to maximize the individual returns. Challenges arise when scaling up the number of agents…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-14 Talal Algumaei , Ruben Solozabal , Reda Alami , Hakim Hacid , Merouane Debbah , Martin Takac

Many hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms utilise a series of independent skills as a basis to solve tasks at a higher level of reasoning. These algorithms don't consider the value of using skills that are cooperative instead of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Jordan Erskine , Chris Lehnert

A large amount of work has been done in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for modeling and solving problems with multiple interacting agents. However, most LLMs are pretrained independently and not specifically optimized for coordination. Existing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Shuo Liu , Tianle Chen , Zeyu Liang , Xueguang Lyu , Christopher Amato

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents typically form a single grand coalition based on credit assignment to tackle a composite task, often resulting in suboptimal performance. This paper proposed a nucleolus-based…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yugu Li , Zehong Cao , Jianglin Qiao , Siyi Hu

Independent on-policy policy gradient algorithms are widely used for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in cooperative and no-conflict games, but they are known to converge sub-optimally when each agent's individual policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Nicholas E. Corrado , Josiah P. Hanna

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has witnessed significant progress with the development of value function factorization methods. It allows optimizing a joint action-value function through the maximization of factorized per-agent…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan , Vaneet Aggarwal