Community-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Transfer and Active Exploration

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Shi, Zhaoyang
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Shi, Zhaoyang
author_facet Shi, Zhaoyang
contents We propose a new framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where the agents cooperate in a time-evolving network with latent community structures and mixed memberships. Unlike traditional neighbor-based or fixed interaction graphs, our community-based framework captures flexible and abstract coordination patterns by allowing each agent to belong to multiple overlapping communities. Each community maintains shared policy and value functions, which are aggregated by individual agents according to personalized membership weights. We also design actor-critic algorithms that exploit this structure: agents inherit community-level estimates for policy updates and value learning, enabling structured information sharing without requiring access to other agents' policies. Importantly, our approach supports both transfer learning by adapting to new agents or tasks via membership estimation, and active learning by prioritizing uncertain communities during exploration. Theoretically, we establish convergence guarantees under linear function approximation for both actor and critic updates. To our knowledge, this is the first MARL framework that integrates community structure, transferability, and active learning with provable guarantees.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Community-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Transfer and Active Exploration
Shi, Zhaoyang
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
Optimization and Control
We propose a new framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where the agents cooperate in a time-evolving network with latent community structures and mixed memberships. Unlike traditional neighbor-based or fixed interaction graphs, our community-based framework captures flexible and abstract coordination patterns by allowing each agent to belong to multiple overlapping communities. Each community maintains shared policy and value functions, which are aggregated by individual agents according to personalized membership weights. We also design actor-critic algorithms that exploit this structure: agents inherit community-level estimates for policy updates and value learning, enabling structured information sharing without requiring access to other agents' policies. Importantly, our approach supports both transfer learning by adapting to new agents or tasks via membership estimation, and active learning by prioritizing uncertain communities during exploration. Theoretically, we establish convergence guarantees under linear function approximation for both actor and critic updates. To our knowledge, this is the first MARL framework that integrates community structure, transferability, and active learning with provable guarantees.
title Community-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Transfer and Active Exploration
topic Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09756