提出一种无需价值分解的多智能体强化学习优化方法,提升协作性能。
ACPO: Agent-Chained Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

- 通过串行化决策过程实现联合策略梯度的去中心化分解
- 在多机器人仓库等场景中超越主流基线,智能体越多优势越明显
- 适合需要高效协同的多智能体系统,尤其适用于大规模场景
多智能体强化学习中的协作任务要求智能体共同最大化共享回报。在集中训练、去中心化执行(CTDE)范式下,策略梯度难以直接计算。现有方法主要分为两类:独立因子化更新结合集中式评论家,缺乏无价值分解假设下的联合改进保证;或交替最优响应更新,可能收敛到次优纳什均衡。本文证明联合策略梯度可精确分解为每个智能体的去中心化项,每项由该智能体的得分函数和去中心化评论家构成。基于此,提出代理链式策略优化(ACPO),各智能体独立训练,其更新共同构成一次联合策略梯度步。核心在于将同步联合决策视为串行过程:智能体依次行动,每个基于对前序动作的信念进行决策,从而将独立更新连接成单一联合步骤。我们在Multi-Robot Warehouse、SMACv2和MA-MuJoCo上评估了ACPO的在线与离线版本,结果表明其优于强基线,且随着智能体数量增加,性能差距持续扩大。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Cooperative tasks in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) require agents to collectively maximize a shared return. Under the Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) paradigm, policy gradients have remained difficult to compute directly. Prior methods largely follow two approaches: independent factorized updates with centralized critics, which lack general joint-improvement guarantees without value decomposition assumptions, or alternating best-response updates, which can converge to suboptimal Nash Equilibria. In this paper, we show the joint policy gradient admits an exact decentralized decomposition of per-agent terms, each formed from per-agent score functions and decentralized critics. Based on this decomposition, we develop Agent-Chained Policy Optimization (ACPO), where actors are trained independently, with their updates together constituting a single step on the joint policy gradient. Central to this result is a serialized view of the simultaneous joint decision in which agents commit actions one at a time, each conditioning on a belief over preceding actions that ties the independent per-agent updates into a single joint step. We evaluate on-policy and off-policy instantiations of ACPO on Multi-Robot Warehouse, SMACv2, and MA-MuJoCo, where it outperforms strong baselines, with the gap widening as the number of agents grows.
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