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Main Authors: Matsuyama, Kanefumi, Su, Kefan, Wang, Jiangxing, Ye, Deheng, Lu, Zongqing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02221
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author Matsuyama, Kanefumi
Su, Kefan
Wang, Jiangxing
Ye, Deheng
Lu, Zongqing
author_facet Matsuyama, Kanefumi
Su, Kefan
Wang, Jiangxing
Ye, Deheng
Lu, Zongqing
contents Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) aims to develop agents that can collaborate effectively. However, most cooperative MARL methods overfit training agents, making learned policies not generalize well to unseen collaborators, which is a critical issue for real-world deployment. Some methods attempt to address the generalization problem but require prior knowledge or predefined policies of new teammates, limiting real-world applications. To this end, we propose a hierarchical MARL approach to enable generalizable cooperation via role diversity, namely CORD. CORD's high-level controller assigns roles to low-level agents by maximizing the role entropy with constraints. We show this constrained objective can be decomposed into causal influence in role that enables reasonable role assignment, and role heterogeneity that yields coherent, non-redundant role clusters. Evaluated on a variety of cooperative multi-agent tasks, CORD achieves better performance than baselines, especially in generalization tests. Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of the constrained objective in generalizable cooperation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_02221
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CORD: Generalizable Cooperation via Role Diversity
Matsuyama, Kanefumi
Su, Kefan
Wang, Jiangxing
Ye, Deheng
Lu, Zongqing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) aims to develop agents that can collaborate effectively. However, most cooperative MARL methods overfit training agents, making learned policies not generalize well to unseen collaborators, which is a critical issue for real-world deployment. Some methods attempt to address the generalization problem but require prior knowledge or predefined policies of new teammates, limiting real-world applications. To this end, we propose a hierarchical MARL approach to enable generalizable cooperation via role diversity, namely CORD. CORD's high-level controller assigns roles to low-level agents by maximizing the role entropy with constraints. We show this constrained objective can be decomposed into causal influence in role that enables reasonable role assignment, and role heterogeneity that yields coherent, non-redundant role clusters. Evaluated on a variety of cooperative multi-agent tasks, CORD achieves better performance than baselines, especially in generalization tests. Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of the constrained objective in generalizable cooperation.
title CORD: Generalizable Cooperation via Role Diversity
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02221