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Hauptverfasser: Feng, Lang, Lin, Jiahao, Xing, Dong, Zhang, Li, Ma, De, Pan, Gang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11100
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author Feng, Lang
Lin, Jiahao
Xing, Dong
Zhang, Li
Ma, De
Pan, Gang
author_facet Feng, Lang
Lin, Jiahao
Xing, Dong
Zhang, Li
Ma, De
Pan, Gang
contents Population-population generalization is a challenging problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), particularly when agents encounter unseen co-players. However, existing self-play-based methods are constrained by the limitation of inside-space generalization. In this study, we propose Bidirectional Distillation (BiDist), a novel mixed-play framework, to overcome this limitation in MARL. BiDist leverages knowledge distillation in two alternating directions: forward distillation, which emulates the historical policies' space and creates an implicit self-play, and reverse distillation, which systematically drives agents towards novel distributions outside the known policy space in a non-self-play manner. In addition, BiDist operates as a concise and efficient solution without the need for the complex and costly storage of past policies. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to support BiDist's effectiveness. Our results highlight its remarkable generalization ability across a variety of cooperative, competitive, and social dilemma tasks, and reveal that BiDist significantly diversifies the policy distribution space. We also present comprehensive ablation studies to reinforce BiDist's effectiveness and key success factors. Source codes are available in the supplementary material.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_11100
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Bidirectional Distillation: A Mixed-Play Framework for Multi-Agent Generalizable Behaviors
Feng, Lang
Lin, Jiahao
Xing, Dong
Zhang, Li
Ma, De
Pan, Gang
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Population-population generalization is a challenging problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), particularly when agents encounter unseen co-players. However, existing self-play-based methods are constrained by the limitation of inside-space generalization. In this study, we propose Bidirectional Distillation (BiDist), a novel mixed-play framework, to overcome this limitation in MARL. BiDist leverages knowledge distillation in two alternating directions: forward distillation, which emulates the historical policies' space and creates an implicit self-play, and reverse distillation, which systematically drives agents towards novel distributions outside the known policy space in a non-self-play manner. In addition, BiDist operates as a concise and efficient solution without the need for the complex and costly storage of past policies. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to support BiDist's effectiveness. Our results highlight its remarkable generalization ability across a variety of cooperative, competitive, and social dilemma tasks, and reveal that BiDist significantly diversifies the policy distribution space. We also present comprehensive ablation studies to reinforce BiDist's effectiveness and key success factors. Source codes are available in the supplementary material.
title Bidirectional Distillation: A Mixed-Play Framework for Multi-Agent Generalizable Behaviors
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11100