Making Teams and Influencing Agents: Efficiently Coordinating Decision Trees for Interpretable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Rex, Milani, Stephanie, Zhang, Zhicheng, Sadeh, Norman, Fang, Fei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908484666130432
author Chen, Rex
Milani, Stephanie
Zhang, Zhicheng
Sadeh, Norman
Fang, Fei
author_facet Chen, Rex
Milani, Stephanie
Zhang, Zhicheng
Sadeh, Norman
Fang, Fei
contents Poor interpretability hinders the practical applicability of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) policies. Deploying interpretable surrogates of uninterpretable policies enhances the safety and verifiability of MARL for real-world applications. However, if these surrogates are to interact directly with the environment within human supervisory frameworks, they must be both performant and computationally efficient. Prior work on interpretable MARL has either sacrificed performance for computational efficiency or computational efficiency for performance. To address this issue, we propose HYDRAVIPER, a decision tree-based interpretable MARL algorithm. HYDRAVIPER coordinates training between agents based on expected team performance, and adaptively allocates budgets for environment interaction to improve computational efficiency. Experiments on standard benchmark environments for multi-agent coordination and traffic signal control show that HYDRAVIPER matches the performance of state-of-the-art methods using a fraction of the runtime, and that it maintains a Pareto frontier of performance for different interaction budgets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19316
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Making Teams and Influencing Agents: Efficiently Coordinating Decision Trees for Interpretable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Chen, Rex
Milani, Stephanie
Zhang, Zhicheng
Sadeh, Norman
Fang, Fei
Multiagent Systems
Poor interpretability hinders the practical applicability of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) policies. Deploying interpretable surrogates of uninterpretable policies enhances the safety and verifiability of MARL for real-world applications. However, if these surrogates are to interact directly with the environment within human supervisory frameworks, they must be both performant and computationally efficient. Prior work on interpretable MARL has either sacrificed performance for computational efficiency or computational efficiency for performance. To address this issue, we propose HYDRAVIPER, a decision tree-based interpretable MARL algorithm. HYDRAVIPER coordinates training between agents based on expected team performance, and adaptively allocates budgets for environment interaction to improve computational efficiency. Experiments on standard benchmark environments for multi-agent coordination and traffic signal control show that HYDRAVIPER matches the performance of state-of-the-art methods using a fraction of the runtime, and that it maintains a Pareto frontier of performance for different interaction budgets.
title Making Teams and Influencing Agents: Efficiently Coordinating Decision Trees for Interpretable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
topic Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19316