提出新方法MARS,解决多智能体强化学习中策略更新不稳定问题。
Rethinking Ratio-Based Trust Regions for Policy Optimization in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

- 用对称几何屏障替代原有比率信任区域机制
- 在47个任务中性能优于或持平现有方法
- 适合需要稳定训练的多智能体协作场景
集中训练、分散执行(CTDE)是合作式多智能体策略梯度强化学习的标准框架,允许智能体在训练时使用联合信息,而执行时仅依赖局部观测。基于比率的信任区域方法如MAPPO和MASPO,利用每个智能体的概率比率并加权联合优势估计来更新分散的策略。但队友非平稳性会增加这些优势的方差,进而放大局部比率更新的方差。这导致两种特定方法失效:MAPPO的加性裁剪会移除异常样本的梯度,削弱从策略漂移中恢复的能力;MASPO的软二次惩罚可能导致概率坍缩。本文提出多智能体比率对称性(MARS),一种新的策略优化目标,将原有的加性比率信任区域机制替换为乘法对称的几何屏障。MARS在概率比率趋近零时赋予无界代价,同时保留修正梯度。在涵盖八个多智能体环境的47个任务中,包括新提出的JAX基准测试PaxMen和AeroJAX,MARS在整体环境级性能上达到或超过MAPPO和MASPO。消融实验表明,性能提升源于对称屏障的几何特性,而非灵活的信任区域边界本身。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) is a standard framework for cooperative multi-agent policy-gradient reinforcement learning, allowing agents to learn from joint information while acting from local observations. Ratio-based trust-region methods such as Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) and Multi-Agent Simple Policy Optimization (MASPO) update decentralized actors using per-agent probability ratios weighted by joint advantage estimates. Teammate non-stationarity increases the variance of these advantages, which in turn increases the variance in the local ratio updates. This exposes two method-specific failure modes: MAPPO's additive clipping removes gradients for outlier samples and weakens recovery from policy drift, while MASPO's soft quadratic penalty can allow probability collapse. We introduce Multi-Agent Ratio Symmetry (MARS), a novel policy optimization objective that replaces these additive ratio-based trust-region mechanisms with a multiplicatively symmetric geometric barrier. MARS preserves corrective gradients while assigning unbounded cost as probability ratios approach zero. Across 47 tasks spanning eight multi-agent environments, including novel JAX benchmarks PaxMen and AeroJAX, MARS matches or exceeds MAPPO and MASPO in aggregate environment-level performance. Ablations show that these gains arise from the geometry of the symmetric barrier rather than from flexible trust-region boundaries alone.
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