Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Under Constrained Communications
Centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) has been the dominant paradigm in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), but its reliance on global state information during training introduces scalability, robustness, and generalization bottlenecks. Moreover, in practical scenarios such as adding/dropping teammates or facing environment dynamics that differ from the training, CTDE methods can be brittle and costly to retrain, whereas distributed approaches allow agents to adapt using only local information and peer-to-peer communication. We present a distributed MARL framework that removes the need for centralized critics or global information. Firstly, we develop a novel Distributed Graph Attention Network (D-GAT) that performs global state inference through multi-hop communication, where agents integrate neighbor features via input-dependent attention weights in a fully distributed manner. Leveraging D-GAT, we develop the distributed graph-attention MAPPO (DG-MAPPO) -- a distributed MARL framework where agents optimize local policies and value functions using local observations, multi-hop communication, and shared/averaged rewards. Empirical evaluation on the StarCraftII Multi-Agent Challenge, Google Research Football, and Multi-Agent Mujoco demonstrates that our method consistently outperforms strong CTDE baselines, achieving superior coordination across a wide range of cooperative tasks with both homogeneous and heterogeneous teams. Our distributed MARL framework provides a principled and scalable solution for robust collaboration, eliminating the need for centralized training or global observability. To the best of our knowledge, DG-MAPPO appears to be the first to fully eliminate reliance on privileged centralized information, enabling agents to learn and act solely through peer-to-peer communication.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Multi-agent Reinforcement LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Signal attenuation enables scalable decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning over networks
Classic multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods require that agents enjoy global state observability, preventing development of decentralized algorithms and limiting scalability. Recent work has shown that, und…
Multi-agent Reinforcement LearningScalable Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent System
Safety and scalability are two critical challenges faced by practical Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). However, existing Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithms that rely solely on reward shaping are ineffective i…
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learningreinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningMulti-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning in Vehicular OCC
Optical camera communications (OCC) has emerged as a key enabling technology for the seamless operation of future autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we introduce a spectral efficiency optimization approach in vehicular …
Autonomous VehiclesDeep Reinforcement Learningreinforcement-learningReinforcement Learning+1FCMNet: Full Communication Memory Net for Team-Level Cooperation in Multi-Agent Systems
Decentralized cooperation in partially-observable multi-agent systems requires effective communications among agents. To support this effort, this work focuses on the class of problems where global communications are ava…
Decision Makingreinforcement-learningReinforcement Learning (RL)Starcraft+1Adversarial Attacks in AI-Driven RAN Slicing: SLA Violations and Recovery
Next-generation (NextG) cellular networks are designed to support emerging applications with diverse data rate and latency requirements, such as immersive multimedia services and large-scale Internet of Things deployment…
Reinforcement Learning