arXiv:2509.15519cs.LG2025-09

提出新方法解决多智能体强化学习中无法协作的难题。

Fully Decentralized Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning is A Context Modeling Problem

  • 将每个智能体的局部任务建模为上下文马尔可夫决策过程。
  • 在多种任务上优于现有基线,提升协作效率。
  • 适合研究分布式多智能体系统与协作学习的读者。

本文研究完全去中心化的协作多智能体强化学习,其中每个智能体仅观测自身状态、本地动作和共享奖励。由于无法获取其他智能体的动作,导致价值函数更新时出现非平稳性,价值函数估计时产生相对过度泛化,阻碍有效协作策略的学习。然而,现有工作难以同时解决这两个问题,原因在于无法在完全去中心化设置中建模其他智能体的联合策略。为此,我们提出一种名为动态感知上下文(Dynamics-Aware Context, DAC)的新方法,将每个智能体所感知的任务形式化为上下文马尔可夫决策过程,并通过动态感知上下文建模同时缓解非平稳性和相对过度泛化问题。具体而言,DAC将每个智能体的非平稳局部任务动态归因于未观测到的上下文切换,每个上下文对应一种不同的联合策略。通过隐变量建模每步动态分布,并将其称为上下文。对每个智能体,引入基于上下文的价值函数以解决价值函数更新中的非平稳性;对于价值函数估计,则推导出乐观边际价值,促进协作动作的选择,从而缓解相对过度泛化。实验在多种协作任务(包括矩阵博弈、捕食者-猎物、SMAC)上评估了DAC,其性能优于多个基线,验证了方法的有效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

This paper studies fully decentralized cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, where each agent solely observes the states, its local actions, and the shared rewards. The inability to access other agents' actions often leads to non-stationarity during value function updates and relative overgeneralization during value function estimation, hindering effective cooperative policy learning. However, existing works fail to address both issues simultaneously, due to their inability to model the joint policy of other agents in a fully decentralized setting. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel method named Dynamics-Aware Context (DAC), which formalizes the task, as locally perceived by each agent, as an Contextual Markov Decision Process, and further addresses both non-stationarity and relative overgeneralization through dynamics-aware context modeling. Specifically, DAC attributes the non-stationary local task dynamics of each agent to switches between unobserved contexts, each corresponding to a distinct joint policy. Then, DAC models the step-wise dynamics distribution using latent variables and refers to them as contexts. For each agent, DAC introduces a context-based value function to address the non-stationarity issue during value function update. For value function estimation, an optimistic marginal value is derived to promote the selection of cooperative actions, thereby addressing the relative overgeneralization issue. Experimentally, we evaluate DAC on various cooperative tasks (including matrix game, predator and prey, and SMAC), and its superior performance against multiple baselines validates its effectiveness.

多智能体强化学习协作上下文建模

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