Centralized Model and Exploration Policy for Multi-Agent RL
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable, fully cooperative multi-agent settings (Dec-POMDPs) can in principle be used to address many real-world challenges such as controlling a swarm of rescue robots or a team of quadcopters. However, Dec-POMDPs are significantly harder to solve than single-agent problems, with the former being NEXP-complete and the latter, MDPs, being just P-complete. Hence, current RL algorithms for Dec-POMDPs suffer from poor sample complexity, which greatly reduces their applicability to practical problems where environment interaction is costly. Our key insight is that using just a polynomial number of samples, one can learn a centralized model that generalizes across different policies. We can then optimize the policy within the learned model instead of the true system, without requiring additional environment interactions. We also learn a centralized exploration policy within our model that learns to collect additional data in state-action regions with high model uncertainty. We empirically evaluate the proposed model-based algorithm, MARCO, in three cooperative communication tasks, where it improves sample efficiency by up to 20x. Finally, to investigate the theoretical sample complexity, we adapt an existing model-based method for tabular MDPs to Dec-POMDPs, and prove that it achieves polynomial sample complexity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".