HypeMARL: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning For High-Dimensional, Parametric, and Distributed Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Botteghi, Nicolò, Tomasetto, Matteo, Fasel, Urban, Braghin, Francesco, Manzoni, Andrea
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Botteghi, Nicolò
Tomasetto, Matteo
Fasel, Urban
Braghin, Francesco
Manzoni, Andrea
author_facet Botteghi, Nicolò
Tomasetto, Matteo
Fasel, Urban
Braghin, Francesco
Manzoni, Andrea
contents Deep reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a promising feedback control strategy for complex dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). When dealing with distributed, high-dimensional problems in state and control variables, multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been proposed as a scalable approach for breaking the curse of dimensionality. In particular, through decentralized training and execution, multiple agents cooperate to steer the system towards a target configuration, relying solely on local state and reward information. However, the principle of locality may become a limiting factor whenever a collective, nonlocal behavior of the agents is crucial to maximize the reward function, as typically happens in PDE-constrained optimal control problems. In this work, we propose HypeMARL: a decentralized MARL algorithm tailored to the control of high-dimensional, parametric, and distributed systems. HypeMARL employs hypernetworks to effectively parametrize the agents' policies and value functions with respect to the system parameters and the agents' relative positions, encoded by sinusoidal positional encoding. Through the application on challenging control problems, such as density and flow control, we show that HypeMARL (i) can effectively control systems through a collective behavior of the agents, outperforming state-of-the-art decentralized MARL, (ii) can efficiently deal with parametric dependencies, (iii) requires minimal hyperparameter tuning and (iv) can reduce the amount of expensive environment interactions by a factor of ~10 thanks to its model-based extension, MB-HypeMARL, which relies on computationally efficient deep learning-based surrogate models approximating the dynamics locally, with minimal deterioration of the policy performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_16709
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HypeMARL: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning For High-Dimensional, Parametric, and Distributed Systems
Botteghi, Nicolò
Tomasetto, Matteo
Fasel, Urban
Braghin, Francesco
Manzoni, Andrea
Machine Learning
Deep reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a promising feedback control strategy for complex dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). When dealing with distributed, high-dimensional problems in state and control variables, multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been proposed as a scalable approach for breaking the curse of dimensionality. In particular, through decentralized training and execution, multiple agents cooperate to steer the system towards a target configuration, relying solely on local state and reward information. However, the principle of locality may become a limiting factor whenever a collective, nonlocal behavior of the agents is crucial to maximize the reward function, as typically happens in PDE-constrained optimal control problems. In this work, we propose HypeMARL: a decentralized MARL algorithm tailored to the control of high-dimensional, parametric, and distributed systems. HypeMARL employs hypernetworks to effectively parametrize the agents' policies and value functions with respect to the system parameters and the agents' relative positions, encoded by sinusoidal positional encoding. Through the application on challenging control problems, such as density and flow control, we show that HypeMARL (i) can effectively control systems through a collective behavior of the agents, outperforming state-of-the-art decentralized MARL, (ii) can efficiently deal with parametric dependencies, (iii) requires minimal hyperparameter tuning and (iv) can reduce the amount of expensive environment interactions by a factor of ~10 thanks to its model-based extension, MB-HypeMARL, which relies on computationally efficient deep learning-based surrogate models approximating the dynamics locally, with minimal deterioration of the policy performance.
title HypeMARL: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning For High-Dimensional, Parametric, and Distributed Systems
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16709