Single-Agent Planning in a Multi-Agent System: A Unified Framework for Type-Based Planners

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhu, Fengming, Lin, Fangzhen
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhu, Fengming
Lin, Fangzhen
author_facet Zhu, Fengming
Lin, Fangzhen
contents We consider a general problem where an agent is in a multi-agent environment and must plan for herself without any prior information about her opponents. At each moment, this pivotal agent is faced with a trade-off between exploiting her currently accumulated information about the other agents and exploring further to improve future (re-)planning. We propose a theoretic framework that unifies a spectrum of planners for the pivotal agent to address this trade-off. The planner at one end of this spectrum aims to find exact solutions, while those towards the other end yield approximate solutions as the problem scales up. Beyond theoretical analysis, we also implement \textbf{13} planners and conduct experiments in a specific domain called \textit{multi-agent route planning} with the number of agents \textbf{up to~50}, to compare their performaces in various scenarios. One interesting observation comes from a class of planners that we call \textit{safe-agents} and their enhanced variants by incorporating domain-specific knowledge, which is a simple special case under the proposed general framework, but performs sufficiently well in most cases. Our unified framework, as well as those induced planners, provides new insights on multi-agent decision-making, with potential applications to related areas such as mechanism design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_08950
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Single-Agent Planning in a Multi-Agent System: A Unified Framework for Type-Based Planners
Zhu, Fengming
Lin, Fangzhen
Multiagent Systems
Computer Science and Game Theory
We consider a general problem where an agent is in a multi-agent environment and must plan for herself without any prior information about her opponents. At each moment, this pivotal agent is faced with a trade-off between exploiting her currently accumulated information about the other agents and exploring further to improve future (re-)planning. We propose a theoretic framework that unifies a spectrum of planners for the pivotal agent to address this trade-off. The planner at one end of this spectrum aims to find exact solutions, while those towards the other end yield approximate solutions as the problem scales up. Beyond theoretical analysis, we also implement \textbf{13} planners and conduct experiments in a specific domain called \textit{multi-agent route planning} with the number of agents \textbf{up to~50}, to compare their performaces in various scenarios. One interesting observation comes from a class of planners that we call \textit{safe-agents} and their enhanced variants by incorporating domain-specific knowledge, which is a simple special case under the proposed general framework, but performs sufficiently well in most cases. Our unified framework, as well as those induced planners, provides new insights on multi-agent decision-making, with potential applications to related areas such as mechanism design.
title Single-Agent Planning in a Multi-Agent System: A Unified Framework for Type-Based Planners
topic Multiagent Systems
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08950