It’s All about Reward: Contrasting Joint Rewards and Individual Reward in Centralized Learning Decentralized Execution Algorithms
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper addresses the issue of choosing an appropriate reward function in multi-agent reinforcement learning. The traditional approach of using joint rewards for team performance is questioned due to a lack of theoretical backing. The authors explore the impact of changing the reward function from joint to individual on learning centralized decentralized execution algorithms in a Level-Based Foraging environment. Empirical results reveal that individual rewards contain more variance, but may have less bias compared to joint rewards. The findings show that different algorithms are affected differently, with value factorization methods and PPO-based methods taking advantage of the increased variance to achieve better performance. This study sheds light on the importance of considering the choice of a reward function and its impact on multi-agent reinforcement learning systems.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it