arXiv:2606.25526cs.LGcs.MA2026-06被引 2

解决多智能体强化学习中优势函数方差过高的问题,提升训练稳定性。

Low Variance Trust Region Optimization with Independent Actors and Sequential Updates in Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

论文配图:Low Variance Trust Region Optimization with Independent Actors and Sequential Updates in Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 采用裁剪目标控制优势函数波动,降低更新方差。
  • 理论证明可实现亚线性收敛至ε-纳什均衡。
  • 在多个基准环境上表现优于现有方法,适合需要稳定训练的场景。

合作式多智能体强化学习中,各智能体共享相同奖励函数,可借助单智能体的信任域框架有效训练。独立行动者设定下,每个智能体仅依赖局部信息决策,应用更灵活。但在顺序更新框架中,每次智能体策略更新后需重新估计联合优势函数。尽管重要性采样已广泛应用,但更新后的优势函数存在指数级高方差问题,易导致收敛不稳。本文首次从理论和实证两方面分析该高方差现象。为克服此限制,提出一种裁剪目标,以控制顺序更新中优势函数的上界波动。基于该目标,建立了单调性边界,并证明可实现亚线性收敛至ε-纳什均衡。进一步设计了两种实用算法。在三个主流多智能体强化学习基准测试中,所提方法在多数环境中均优于基线模型。通过细致分析不同训练设置,验证了该方法具备稳定的收敛性与低优势函数估计方差。代码已公开于https://github.com/giangbang/Low-Variance-Trust-Region-MARL。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning assumes each agent shares the same reward function and can be trained effectively using the Trust Region framework of single-agent. Instead of relying on other agents' actions, the independent actors setting considers each agent to act based only on its local information, thus having more flexible applications. However, in the sequential update framework, it is required to re-estimate the joint advantage function after each individual agent's policy step. Despite the practical success of importance sampling, the updated advantage function suffers from exponentially high variance problems, which likely result in unstable convergence. In this work, we first analyze the high variance advantage both empirically and theoretically. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a clipping objective to control the upper bounds of the advantage fluctuation in sequential updates. With the proposed objective, we provide a monotonic bound with sub-linear convergence to $ε$-Nash Equilibria. We further derive two new practical algorithms using our clipping objective. The experiment results on three popular multi-agent reinforcement learning benchmarks show that our proposed method outperforms the tested baselines in most environments. By carefully analyzing different training settings, our proposed method is highlighted with both stable convergence properties and the desired low advantage variance estimation. For reproducibility purposes, our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/giangbang/Low-Variance-Trust-Region-MARL.

多智能体强化学习信任域稳定性

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