arXiv:2601.12518cs.LGcs.AI2026-01

在通信受限下,用旧梯度预测基策略,实现高效多智能体协作学习。

Cooperative Multi-agent RL with Communication Constraints

  • 用旧梯度预测多个基策略,减少策略偏差。
  • 理论证明仅需 $O(\varepsilon^{-3/4})$ 次通信即可达 $ε$-纳什均衡。
  • 适合通信成本高的分布式多智能体系统,如复杂仿真环境。

协同多智能体强化学习常假设可频繁访问全局信息(如团队奖励或其它智能体动作),但在去中心化系统中,高通信成本使该假设不现实。通信受限时,智能体需依赖过时信息估计梯度并更新策略。常用方法为重要性采样,但当缺失数据概率高时,基策略过时导致其迅速不稳定。为此,本文提出基策略预测技术:利用旧梯度预测策略更新,并收集一系列基策略的样本,缩小基策略与当前策略间的差距。该方法使样本可在单次通信回合内生成,显著减少通信轮次。理论上,算法在势博弈中以 $O(\varepsilon^{-3/4})$ 次通信轮次和 $O(poly(\max_i |A_i|)\varepsilon^{-11/4})$ 样本收敛至 $\varepsilon$-纳什均衡,优于现有成果,且无联合动作空间大小的指数依赖。结果进一步拓展至一般马尔可夫协作博弈,以求得个体局部最优。实验验证了该方法在模拟游戏及MAPPO复杂环境中的有效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Cooperative MARL often assumes frequent access to global information in a data buffer, such as team rewards or other agents' actions, which is typically unrealistic in decentralized MARL systems due to high communication costs. When communication is limited, agents must rely on outdated information to estimate gradients and update their policies. A common approach to handle missing data is called importance sampling, in which we reweigh old data from a base policy to estimate gradients for the current policy. However, it quickly becomes unstable when the communication is limited (i.e. missing data probability is high), so that the base policy in importance sampling is outdated. To address this issue, we propose a technique called base policy prediction, which utilizes old gradients to predict the policy update and collect samples for a sequence of base policies, which reduces the gap between the base policy and the current policy. This approach enables effective learning with significantly fewer communication rounds, since the samples of predicted base policies could be collected within one communication round. Theoretically, we show that our algorithm converges to an $\varepsilon$-Nash equilibrium in potential games with only $O(\varepsilon^{-3/4})$ communication rounds and $O(poly(\max_i |A_i|)\varepsilon^{-11/4})$ samples, improving existing state-of-the-art results in communication cost, as well as sample complexity without the exponential dependence on the joint action space size. We also extend these results to general Markov Cooperative Games to find an agent-wise local maximum. Empirically, we test the base policy prediction algorithm in both simulated games and MAPPO for complex environments.

多智能体通信约束强化学习策略预测

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