Putting Data at the Centre of Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Formanek, Claude, Beyers, Louise, Tilbury, Callum Rhys, Shock, Jonathan P., Pretorius, Arnu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Formanek, Claude
Beyers, Louise
Tilbury, Callum Rhys
Shock, Jonathan P.
Pretorius, Arnu
author_facet Formanek, Claude
Beyers, Louise
Tilbury, Callum Rhys
Shock, Jonathan P.
Pretorius, Arnu
contents Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is an exciting direction of research that uses static datasets to find optimal control policies for multi-agent systems. Though the field is by definition data-driven, efforts have thus far neglected data in their drive to achieve state-of-the-art results. We first substantiate this claim by surveying the literature, showing how the majority of works generate their own datasets without consistent methodology and provide sparse information about the characteristics of these datasets. We then show why neglecting the nature of the data is problematic, through salient examples of how tightly algorithmic performance is coupled to the dataset used, necessitating a common foundation for experiments in the field. In response, we take a big step towards improving data usage and data awareness in offline MARL, with three key contributions: (1) a clear guideline for generating novel datasets; (2) a standardisation of over 80 existing datasets, hosted in a publicly available repository, using a consistent storage format and easy-to-use API; and (3) a suite of analysis tools that allow us to understand these datasets better, aiding further development.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_12001
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Putting Data at the Centre of Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Formanek, Claude
Beyers, Louise
Tilbury, Callum Rhys
Shock, Jonathan P.
Pretorius, Arnu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is an exciting direction of research that uses static datasets to find optimal control policies for multi-agent systems. Though the field is by definition data-driven, efforts have thus far neglected data in their drive to achieve state-of-the-art results. We first substantiate this claim by surveying the literature, showing how the majority of works generate their own datasets without consistent methodology and provide sparse information about the characteristics of these datasets. We then show why neglecting the nature of the data is problematic, through salient examples of how tightly algorithmic performance is coupled to the dataset used, necessitating a common foundation for experiments in the field. In response, we take a big step towards improving data usage and data awareness in offline MARL, with three key contributions: (1) a clear guideline for generating novel datasets; (2) a standardisation of over 80 existing datasets, hosted in a publicly available repository, using a consistent storage format and easy-to-use API; and (3) a suite of analysis tools that allow us to understand these datasets better, aiding further development.
title Putting Data at the Centre of Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12001