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Record W4409381863 · doi:10.1609/aaai.v39i28.35158

Exploring the Efficacy of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Cyber Defence: A CAGE Challenge 4 Perspective

2025· article· en· W4409381863 on OpenAlex
Mitchell Kiely, Metin Ahiskali, Étienne Borde, Benjamin Bowman, David Bowman, Dirk Van Bruggen, K H Cowan, Prithviraj Dasgupta, Erich Devendorf, Ben Edwards, Alex Fitts, Sunny Fugate, Ryan Gabrys, W. T. S. Gould, Hao Huang, Ryan Kerr, Isaiah J. King, Li Li, Luis Martínez‐Sobrido, Christopher R. Moir, Craig E. Murphy, Olivia Naish, Claire Owens, Miranda Purchase, Ahmad Ridley, Adrian Taylor, Sarah Farmer, William Valentine, Yiyi Zhang

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicAdvanced Malware Detection Techniques
Canadian institutionsDefence Research and Development Canada
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPerspective (graphical)Reinforcement learningReinforcementCageComputer sciencePsychologyCognitive scienceHuman–computer interactionEngineeringSocial psychologyArtificial intelligenceStructural engineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

As cyber threats become increasingly automated and sophisticated, novel solutions must be introduced to improve defence of enterprise networks. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has demonstrated potential in mitigating these advanced threats. Single DRL Agents have proven utility toward execution of autonomous cyber defence. Despite the success of employing single DRL Agents, this approach presents significant limitations, especially regarding scalability within large enterprise networks. An attractive alternative to the single agent approach is the use of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). However, developing MARL agents is costly with few options for examining MARL cyber defence techniques against adversarial agents. This paper presents a MARL network security environment, the fourth iteration of the Cyber Autonomy Gym for Experimentation (CAGE) challenges. This challenge was specifically designed to test the efficacy of MARL algorithms in an enterprise network. Our work aims to evaluate the potential of MARL as a robust and scalable solution for autonomous network defence.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.962
Threshold uncertainty score0.660

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.150
GPT teacher head0.343
Teacher spread0.193 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it